


Small Crimes

by GirlCalledBob



Series: Small Criminals [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bag 'o cats crazy, F/M, Post-Avengers dungeon fic, Romance, Slow Burn, Two people sitting around talking, cute idiots in love, descriptions of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-13
Updated: 2015-01-24
Packaged: 2018-02-04 13:03:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 27
Words: 42,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1780114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GirlCalledBob/pseuds/GirlCalledBob
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The dungeons of Asgard are filled with cut-throats, murderers, barbarians, and monsters, and Loki knows which of those he is. It's the quiet, defeated young woman in the cell across from him that's confusing. No matter, though; if she won't tell him all her secrets, he'll just have to rip them out of her. And hope he doesn't find more than he'd planned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Lion's Den

She sat in the cell across the hallway, her legs folded beneath her and her head tipped back against the side wall, exposing the slim line of her neck and hiding her face behind waves and waves of white-blonde hair. Once Loki's mind cleared enough that he noticed her, she was all he could notice.

In his old life, he might have considered her a temptation - she was close enough to his preference, from what he could see. Small and slight, easily crowded beneath a tall frame and intimidated, dominated, even if he did not have his brother’s - _false_ brother’s - strength to use against her. Fair, pale, her bare arms dashed with freckles he might have sought to taste. The lines of her body were modest but pleasant beneath her shapeless tunic, and even if he could not see her face he judged her to be a worthy enough pursuit.  
Or so she would have been, in his old life, in that lie he had once believed was real. It was hardly worth musing on now; that he did so was habit, old thoughts creeping in unbidden - but then, he was not so much the master of his own thoughts lately, was he? Could he even lie to himself, now, and make believe that he could still see the delicate beauty in a woman - and not just the fragile life that fairly begged to be crushed beneath his heel.

The questions chased themselves around in his head until he was resisting the urge to _claw_ them out; he couldn’t do that anymore, not here where people could see. Where someone was sitting just across the hallway, just right _there_. So he focused on her instead, and told himself it was not because he was still sweating out adrenaline - just because she was there, the only thing there that he might spend any attention on. Hardly worth anything, even in his old life, even now, but a little attention, maybe. A little distraction. An amusing diversion to while away his time until his plans could begin again.  
With this new resolution the whispering thoughts passed, and Loki opened eyes to regard her again, sneering to himself at her flaws: too pale, sickly almost, paler even than himself. And so thin, so brittle. He could break her wrist in one hand alone, the bones grinding and cracking...

“And what so terrible a crime could so lovely a creature commit?” Loki mused out loud, just loud enough, he judged, for the object of his scrutiny to hear him. She did not even twitch; Loki scowled, denied his distraction. He kept talking, to keep the madness at bay. “I wonder. After all, one so pretty as you could charm your way out of any lesser offence, surely? Secure a kinder punishment?” He smirked, tilting his head. “Marriage, perhaps?”

She turned her head, glaring at him through the curtain of her hair. Loki chuckled softly to himself. Even without seeing her face, it was easy enough to get a read on her anger.  
“No?” He asked, trying on an innocent smile for the first time in a while, pleased by how easily it still fit. The woman in the other cell did not seem convinced, but then, she was not meant to be. “I thought that was the accepted punishment for the… lesser sex?” If his smile faltered, just for an instant, it was because he let it. Because he wanted her to see a glimpse. Not because of the boiling madness beneath his skin. He took a breath and nearly choked on it. “Whoever you have wronged must find you truly abhorrent, then. What a pity that is… I would have thought you must have _some_ use in you…”  
“Be quiet,” she snarled, voice all ragged misuse, and dropped her head back against the wall. Loki felt a flash of anger at the dismissal, his smile not just slipping but twisting, his so careful control over his expression snapping under the weight of the fury and the bitter resentment he had hidden for so long.

He turned away; there was no other way to hide it. Not now it was out. And he would _not_ be seen like this. It took several long moments and all his strength to swallow his rage, lest it devour what little sanity he had clawed back from the brink.

It burned in his mind, the urge to find a way to rip her limb from limb, his imprisonment be damned. Not only for her insolence, but because he could not be sure she hadn’t seen… that. It had been plaguing him for so long now he could not be certain when it began, this insult, this defect he despised in himself. It had lost him Midgard, lost him everything, and this worthless scrap of a woman had turned her face away but that didn’t mean she had not seen it. That loss of control. It would give her such power over him, if she had; a power he could not define, and even less could he allow. Even now, mired in a madness he was only recently becoming aware enough to identify, his strength was in the mask he could still present - no clawing at his skull, no screaming and raging, no ugliness, no pain, no-

“You think too much.”  
Her words caught his mind before it unravelled once more, and the cold surety of his disdain was enough to repair the crack in his mask. She had finally moved, it seemed, if only to push her hair behind her ears to smirk nastily at him. The expression was cruel, but it didn’t fit on the soft roundness of her face, leaving her looking more foolish than cruel. He was absolutely right in his previous assessment, for she would easily have been worth the pursuit. No great beauty, perhaps, but a plain sort of loveliness - and all the more out of place for it. Great beauty sometimes saw great trouble; such common plainness rarely saw anything of note.  
Loki glared; the women glared back. He thought it was not an expression she attempted often, for his was surely the darker and colder of the pair, and he was hardly affected by her weak imitation. “You think too much,” she repeated, with obvious contempt. “Thinking down here will serve you ill.”  
“Am I to believe you care?” He sneered, though his words rang truer than he’d meant them, that not even a lowly prisoner would care about him. That no one ever had. She gave a little mocking snort of laughter, and his rage only grew.  
“You are to believe I do not care for your dramatics, and wish to reduce them.”

In that instant, Loki realised that he quite hated this woman; for to his mind it seemed as if she saw through his every disguise, and it filled him with rage that she might dare to judge what she saw there. He hated her and he was _fascinated_ with her, for she was the only thing of interest presented to him and she was, despite - or perhaps because of – her dangerous ability to _perceive_ , fascinating.  
He _hated_ her, and he needed a distraction. Therefore, he was going to dedicate himself to the task of taking her apart, piece by piece; and then, when she was broken and laid out before him, perhaps he would finally understand _why_ he hated her with this pure and perfect intensity.

In the very least, it would pass the time.


	2. Princes and Servants and Gods

“What is your name, fair one?”

She sighed to herself, her eyes cracking open as she turned her heavy head towards him, hair falling across her face. The disgraced Prince of Asgard had been silent for almost a day, but she had hardly expected it to last. From what she remembered… but no. That was too long ago to matter. Everything had changed far too much; she would be foolish to think he had not changed too. As naive as the girl-child who had watched him so intently when they were both young, and there was room in her life for such an innocent obsession.  
After so long in the dungeons, naivete was something she could no longer afford.

Loki had pulled a chair over to the centre of his cell, facing away, and was leaning over the back to watch her, his head half tilted with something like playful curiosity. The smile on his lips was a pretty thing, but she imagined she could see the strain, the impurity of the fake compared to… yet still, such a pretty thing. He laughed at the look of irritation she was giving him, and the illusion of beauty was shattered.  
“If you will not tell me your name, I shall have to think of other things to call you,” he mused, his smirk deadly and eyes bright. “Let me think…”  
“Johnny,” she said, her voice still thick and uncomfortable on her tongue after so long here alone; perhaps she should have kept her silence, but she didn’t wish to know what names he could imagine for her. What little hope she had left wouldn’t survive it, so she told him, straightening her hunched shoulders like a challenge. Loki just grinned, triumphant.  
“Johnny…” he repeated, savouring the sound with no small amusement. “Of course you are.”

She didn’t want to know what that meant, and she didn’t want to find out. In her haste to ensure she never did, she made the grave mistake of speaking.  
“Yes, Johnny, no matter how the guards might call me Johanna,” she said, tripping over the words, cursing them even as she said them. She turned her back to Loki’s brilliant grin, but could not escape his delighted laugh. It was wrong, so wrong; all her carefully remembered observation, her careful, childish study - all it did for her now was taunt her with how _wrong_ this was.  
“Pretty Johanna, is it?” He called across the hall, voice laced with poison. “Fair and lovely Johanna. So ill suited to a dungeon cell, and yet here she is. No, no I think you have the truth of it, Johnny. Johanna is not suited to you, not at all.” She could imagine all too well the smile in his deliberate, calculated pause. “You are far too wretched.”  
Johnny might have thought the taunts of the guards would have hardened her, but those stupid, brutal men… they had none of Loki’s cruel precision. She did not blame him for the attack, so much as she blamed herself for affording him the opening. That he was broken and angry was not only obvious to her - it was unsurprising. She’d always known he would be, someday, even if she had ever held out hope he would not.  
“If I am wretched,” she asked him, through clenched teeth, “then what are you, Loki?”

“Hold your tongue!”  
The clatter of the chair, and the vicious, offended bite in his tone startled her; looking back over her shoulder, she found him standing.  
“A creature such as you has no right to speak familiar to me,” he snarled, eyes narrow. “Even now, I am your better, woman, and you will do well to remember it.”

She laughed for the first time in as long as she could remember, bitter, angry mirth spilling from her lungs like glass. The longer she laughed the more it hurt, scraping her throat raw until she was bent nearly double and coughing as she tried to breathe. The look of shocked confusion on his face, wided eyed and blinking bewilderment, was worth every pain in her chest.  
“There are no betters here,” she told him, voice hoarse and trembling. “There are no princes and servants and gods, not here. We are both prisoners, and here, there is only me and you, Loki. Only me and you.” Her second laugh came out as a broken cough, shaking her body as she leaned back against the wall with a tired thump. “Remember _that_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the short chapters, I swear they'll get longer.
> 
> A note on Johnny's name:  
> Obviously we view Johnny as a very 'male' name, but there's no reason it would be on Asgard. Of course, Johnny's full name being Johnna, said with a soft 'J' sound, her nickname was orginally something closer to Yoni, but over the years it's changed into a harsher, harder sound, closer to how we would pronouce Johnny, so that's how I'm spelling it.  
> Incidentally, it's a very childish name, which is why Loki finds it so very funny. We all have slightly naff sounding childish nicknames we grew out of, right?
> 
> See you next week.


	3. Games of Resolve

Her outburst had unsettled him, and so he ignored her. It was not, in the end, as hard to do as he might have feared. He worked on weaving his illusions, so that he might maintain some dignity here, and some privacy. His false mother - his mother - sent down books, which he read in fits and starts of brittle, unhappy energy. He paced the cell, he slept, he ran over the past year in his head trying to understand what had gone wrong - why he had lost so much control over even his own wishes, _what had he even been trying to achieve_ \- no, not that, that he pushed away before it could begin and went back to reading, or pacing, or sleeping. All these things he did, restlessly and endlessly, and never once did he so much as glance across the hall to the woman in the other cell.

He never looked at her, but he also knew that she never moved, not even when the guards brought food and taunted and mocked her. She did not respond to them, not like she had to him, but their taunts were clumsy, child-like things, and it was clear she was better than them. If she slept, she did so slumped against the wall, her head hanging tiredly; she did not eat at all.  
She unsettled him. He wanted to break her down, tear her apart - reduce her down until she could not longer strike right to the core of him with every choked out word. He had never seen her stand, and he wanted to, just so he could make her kneel. He wanted to know her, and own her, her ire and her freckles and her poorly conceived glare, dig his teeth in and drag out every scrap of her strength and _feast_. Leave nothing left.

His resolve to ignore her lasted three days. And then he settled himself by the open wall of his cage, leaning lazily against the side wall in a parody of her own pose, his fingertips running along the invisible field of energy that separated them, feeling it tingle across his skin.  
“Oh, Johnny,” he cooed fondly, smiling when she tensed, sending a ripple through her hair. “Dear, dear Johnny. Have I offended you?” She did not speak. “I fear I have, for you will not even show me your pretty face.”  
“It is a loss you will survive,” Johnny rasped; it seemed her voice was still damaged by her pained laughter. At least she, too, had suffered from that. He chuckled at her words, grinning when she tensed again.  
“Survive, perhaps, but I shall be the poorer for it,” he tapped his fingers against the energy field. The hum as it adapted and adjusted pleasing to his ears, weary of the sounds of battle. “There is so little down here that is beautiful.”  
“I am not here for you to look upon.” She sounded tired as she spoke, but her words set his mind in motion. To be here she must have committed a terrible crime indeed, but what? She was so weak, so delicate; her hands looked barely half the size of his own. What violence could one so small and pathetic commit? Had it struck him as strange before? He honestly did not recall, the past few days a blur of anger and little else to his fractured memory, and it troubled him that he barely even knew what words he had spoken to her, and what reactions those words had prompted… and why he was angry in the first place.  
“Why are you here?” He asked, caught up in his troubling realisations so deeply that he spoke without thinking just to free himself from them. She tipped her head to the side to look at him, apparently trying to gauge his intentions. The sudden movement caught him off guard. At his best, he could have made some well aimed taunt out of a smile, but, caught so off guard, he settled for a look of blank curiosity. “Well?”  
Johnny smirked, a teasing little quirk that under other circumstances - in his old life - might have made Loki burn with want to bite that smile back into her mouth. Now it only made him uneasy, caught between disgust and arousal, and the sure, unpleasant feeling that she was not fooled by a single one of his masks.

It was several minutes later, still wrestling with his emotions, that Loki realised Johnny had not spoken, simply turned her face away from him again. His hand flexed into a fist at his side.  
“Will you not tell me your crime, dear, pretty Johnny?”  
“Cease calling me that,” Johnny said, instead of answering him. “I am neither pretty nor dear to you.” She lifted a hand to brush back her hair and glare at him from the corner of her eyes. It was the first time he’d ever seen her arm move, the scattering of freckles shifting over her muscles and catching his eye, and for a twisted moment he wondered if they would scrape off with the first layer of skin, or if he would have to go deeper. “And no, I will not tell you.”  
“Then I shall guess,” he decided. Johnny sighed, her hand dropping back down to her side, hair falling once again over her face. Loki was glad; it was easier to look at her when she did not look back with knowing eyes.  
“Must you?” She asked, voice filled with resignation. Loki grinned brightly, tapping the energy field again, humming along.  
“You can hardly stop me, Johnny.”  
“Yet it did not harm me to ask.”  
“Not even your pride?” He raised an eyebrow.  
She sighed. “I have none.”  
“Then your crime was not one of pride,” Loki noted. “You see? Is this not fun?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear these chapters do get longer eventually. Still beta'd by the world's most patient and generous sibling.


	4. Broken

“Theft, perhaps, of some thing of sentiment,” Loki suggested out loud. Johnny couldn’t help but smile to herself. He’d been doing this every so often for a week or so now - at first, she assumed, to annoy her, but now she suspected he was doing it more to amuse himself than out of any actual malice. All genuine spite had seemed to have left him after the first few days, leaving behind it an empty, unsatisfied energy that he seemed not to know what to do with. Little seemed to hold his interest for long, but eventually, he always came back to this foolish game of his.  
“You have already guessed theft, Loki,” she reminded him. He huffed, the noise a grumpy little puff of sound that made her look over out of sheer surprise. Loki was pouting, his arms folded across his chest, looking more like the young prince than…

But no. He wasn’t. Not anymore.  
“I have guessed petty theft, not theft of some precious, sentimental thing,” he corrected petulantly. “There is a difference.”  
“Is there?” She asked idly, rolling her eyes, even if he could not see her do so behind her hair. Loki huffed again, getting up and stretching his arms over his head. Johnny had noticed in the past few days that he had shrouded his cell in illusions, covering over the old marks on the wall, making the little room seem less heartless. Even if it was fake, she envied him the pretense - her own cell had not even the meager furniture he had been granted, and compared to his now the stark reality of her cold prison seemed almost too much to bear. “Do you yield, then?”  
“I tire of your insolence,” Loki grumbled, laying on his bed and staring up at the ceiling, his arms folded on his chest. For a moment, Johnny thought he was going to say something else, but he seemed suddenly to decide against it, closing his eyes. She had held his attention for even less than usual, but she was determined not to be offended.

Free of his scrutiny, Johnny allowed herself a little of her own, pushing her hair behind her ears to better observe the slow rise and fall of his hands on his chest. Like this, his prison rags disguised as more worthy clothes, he seemed as utterly regal as ever he had, peaceful in repose. Beautiful, even... but then, Johnny had always thought that. Even when he had first been brought here, before he had noticed her or anything of his surroundings, when he had raved and seethed in brutal, insane anger, there had still been a beauty to him.  
But not like this, elegant and soft. This… she prefered.

She waited until she was sure he slept, and then slowly climbed to her trembling feet, hobbling across the cell. Her legs no longer supported her weight without the support of the wall she leant against. The cuts and bruises and scratches, half healed, ran too deep and stung as muscles stretched and burned from disuse; the old breaks untreated and healed crooked made her bow-legged and unstable. She hurt more than usual today, for she had barely stretched her legs since Loki had been brought here, not willing to let him see her weakness, and the rest had only done her ill. But even before that, by herself and with no medical knowledge to speak of, she had never been able to deal with the damage dealt her. The beatings were not always severe enough to break bones, but when they were, those bones rarely healed straight, and it had only gotten worse over time. Her chest felt better though, and her throat, clearer from all the talking Loki seemed capable of dragging out of her. Her thin, pained breaths only expressed her discomfort, rather than adding to it.

Before Loki had arrived, she had hardly spoken two words in years; the guards had nothing of worth to say, only insults to throw at her broken feet, and they treated her the same whether she answered them or not. Loki, with his biting wit and endless irritating games, at least seemed to require an answer of her, and gave her some thin sliver of amusement from defying him when she could. Perhaps, in his own, twisted way, he even provided something like companionship, to see her through her days in something more than dreary defeat.

It hurt too much to stand, so she moved back to her usual spot, lowering herself down carefully. Stretching her legs out in front of her, she took advantage of Loki’s slumber to pay attention to old wounds. Hooking one hand under her knee, she pushed the joint up, wincing at the pull of torn muscle, easing it as far as it would go and then back down again before repeating the motion on the other side, all the while keeping one eye on the sleeping prince, searching for signs of waking. Just once, very quietly, he whimpered in his sleep, his head turning against his pillow, and Johnny froze; but he moved no further, settling back into silent, if perhaps not restful, sleep.

By the time she had completed her stretches and curled her legs back under herself again, almost an hour had passed, and he still had not woken; for once, Johnny felt safe enough to lay down on her side to sleep, curled up against the back wall of her cell.

She was woken by the guards bringing food. More accurately, she was woken by a foot slamming itself into her unprotected ribs, knocking her back against the wall behind her and forcing her awake with a grunt.  
“Wake up!”  
Johnny lifted her head just enough to glare at the guard, curling in on herself to protect against further beating; he simply snorted in disgust, tossing her food down beside her and leaving. As he walked away, she saw green eyes watching her from across the hall and scowled, forcing herself to sit up against the side wall. Keeping her legs curled behind her so that Loki would not see.  
“Rude of them,” Loki remarked blandly, picking at his own food. “Do you plan to eat?”  
“No.”  
“Hmm.” He smirked. “Then I can assume you are not imprisoned here for stealing food.”

His disinterest, in light of her humiliation, stung more than it should have; Johnny sighed, tipping her head back She _was_ hungry, in truth, but the food held little appeal. Even less appealing was the thought of Loki watching while she choked down the bland, tasteless porridge, especially not with the ache in her ribs that would surely make swallowing painful. Even the gentlest of his mockery would be too much for her now.  
She pressed her hand against her side, checking for any breaks, for all the good that it would do. There was soreness, but no sign of a fracture, and the breath she hissed out was as much relief than pain, her head hanging for a second.  
When she looked up, Loki was watching her, his head half tilted and his food forgotten beside him. As far as she could tell, his curiosity was genuine. That did not mean it was not dangerous.  
“Hurts?” He asked, with no trace of either amusement or sympathy; Johnny sniffed, refusing to answer. “Whatever did you do to antagonise them?”  
“I am weak, and within their power,” she replied, the words rolling off her tongue before she could really think about them. Loki hummed thoughtfully, returning to his meal. Despite that his food looked no different from hers, he managed to seem graceful, spooning the grey slop into his mouth. Johnny sighed, nudging her own bowl with her hand. “How does that taste?”  
“Awful,” Loki told her, with a slight, amused smile. “Try it.”  
“I think not.”  
“True, it must be quite uncomfortable to eat with your ribs bruised so,” he allowed. Johnny tensed, bracing herself for the cutting words that would surely follow. “Perhaps in a few hours your appetite shall return.” He smiled a mild, thin smile at her, and Johnny narrowed her eyes, trying to see any of the tell-tale signs of deceit. “And you can tell me what you think of our…breakfast.” He wrinkled his nose eloquently, pushing his bowl away from him, and Johnny had to bite back a startled laugh. “Such as it is.”

Johnny frowned to herself a moment, still trying to understand why Loki was being so… pleasant. Perhaps not _nice_ to her, but very nearly civil. Her hair was getting in her way, and so she hooked it back behind both ears, the pain in her ribs forgotten as she leaned forward slightly. Loki raised an eyebrow at her.  
“Yes?” He demanded. “As lovely as it is to see your face, did you wish something from me?” He sneered as he spoke, his tone making it quite clear what he thought of her face, and Johnny sighed, slumping back against the wall.  
“No, Loki,” she muttered, reaching down to rub discreetly at her ankle. “There is nothing you can give me, that I would wish for.”


	5. Games of Wits

Johnny had tucked her hair back behind her ears.

Such a small gesture, yet Loki could not stop looking at her; from the corners of his eyes, over the cover of the book he was not actually reading. Such a small thing, there is absolutely no reason he should have noticed the difference at all. He’s observant, of course, and there was precious little else there to observe, but, aside from being an amusing distraction, Johnny was nothing _special_.  
Johnny, her hair tucked back behind her ears, looked up, her eyes quick and nervous, stealing a glance like a secret. Loki pretended to concentrate on his book, even turning a page for good measure, for all that it was unread. All the while, watching her.  
She smiled. It was not much of a smile, only a faint tilt of her lips, and a sad one, her eyes soft around the edges with a thing akin to pity.

There was an expected flash of irritation at that - that a creature as wretched as _Johanna_ found him pitiful - but when Loki braced himself to reject the twisted anger that would follow, it didn’t come. Instead, he felt mostly curiosity. Closing his book, he smirked to himself at the way Johnny jerked her head down suddenly, as if she could have hidden her staring.  
“Is there a problem?” He asked smoothly, behaving as if he were reacting only to catching her staring. The smile would be their secret from each other, and the hair was hardly worth mentioning. Hardly worth _noticing_ ; he only had because he was bored, and it was different.  
“No,” Johnny said quickly - too quickly. Loki allowed himself the gentle tease of a grin. “When you are quiet I begin to suspect things, Loki.”  
“I cannot imagine what you mean.” He gestured with his book. “I was reading.”  
“You hadn’t turned a page in near twenty minutes,” Johnny said; then, realising her mistake, she covered her mouth with one hand, and she _blushed_.

Johnny was not especially pretty, of course; for one, she had far too many freckles, and, given any other source of beauty to look at, Loki would certainly not choose willingly to look at her. And yet, when she blushed, those same freckles seemed to stand out like stars on a dark night, the dark smudges highlighted by the pink on her skin. It was not necessarily attractive, only… interesting.  
It did occur to Loki that, for all his protests, he was gathering quite the list of things about Johnny that were interesting.  
“I hardly think I am entertaining enough to watch for so long,” he suggested lazily. “Especially if I have not turned a single page. Was there something you wanted? No?” Johnny glared at him. “You are aware that your nose wrinkles when you do that? It’s quite comical.”  
“So glad to be a source of amusement,” Johnny grumbled, rubbing a hand over her face.

The brittle note of irritation in her voice was really quite hurtful; he had hardly been teasing her _that_ badly now, had he? Just a little fun, really. His first instinct was to respond in kind - if she was so intent on being offended, why should he not at least give her true cause for offense? But even the thought of it was tiring to him. As satisfying as it would be to crush her, he no longer felt the urge so strongly as he had.

There were many things, he had begun to realise, that had seemed appealing in the depths of his madness, and no longer held interest to him now. Perhaps it was time to consider that damaging his only source of interest was one of those things.

He smiled disarmingly, though Johnny looked more on guard than disarmed. Likely she was wondering what he was up to, but that would pass.  
“Of course,” he said brightly, setting his book aside. “That was unfair of me.” When Johnny offered him no answer but a narrowing of her eyes, he smiled again, standing. “Would you not agree, then?”  
“Certainly I agree,” she replied slowly. “What game are you playing now?”  
“That’s a cruel accusation,” Loki said, affecting a hurt look. This, he had missed this. Playing someone with gentle words, simply for the joy of the lie. Johnny, to his quiet delight, actually rolled her eyes at him.  
“Do you deny it, then?”  
“Not at all.” He smiled lazily, as if he did not expect her to see through him. Let her congratulate herself for seeing past the surface, never realising there was so much more she did not see. “It has been some time since I have engaged in a proper game of wits. I find it quite exciting.”  
“And if I do not wish to play this game?” Johnny asked, voice tired. Loki frowned. Oh, that would not do.  
“But we are already playing, Johnny. In fact, I suppose you may even be winning.” He smirked, tilting his head. “For now.”  
“Don’t you think the nature of the game is such that I cannot fail to lose?” She mused. Loki thought he heard a little amusement in her voice, and was pleased by it. A willing playmate held a different kind of interest than a reluctant one, but was generally easier to control. “Unless you lose interest and refuse to guess further, but I doubt you shall.”  
“You have such little imagination,” Loki sighed, thinning his smile into a disappointed frown. “There is quite the easy way for you to win, you know.”  
“And I daresay you’re going to tell me, so you might tell yourself I have not truly won at all?”

Johnny’s gloomy, irritated frown had softened, her face finding a more neutral emotion now he was not actively antagonising her. It fit her much better; she looked less absurd like that. Loki bowed his head to her politely.  
“Of course I am,” he agreed, with a wicked grin. That Johnny seemed more amused than charmed did not lessen his enjoyment one bit. She moved her hands to tuck her hair behind her ears, seeming startled to find it was already there. “Simply tell me your crime, and spare me the fun of guessing.”  
“Ah,” Johnny smiled; not a sad thing this time, or an angry, bitter tease of a smirk, but a lazy, playful smile of triumph, half there and awkward, as if she had not attempted such an expression in some time. “But then we should both lose, for I would be spared the fun of defying you.”

Loki bowed his head again, conceding her point; Johnny smiled faintly to herself and shook her head, her shoulders rolling back a little straighter against the wall.  
“So I ask again,” she said, the tired rasp of her voice warmer than he had heard it yet, “why should I play a game that you are certain to win?”  
“For the game itself, of course. You’ve little else to amuse you.”  
“Not even books to pretend to read,” she agreed. “I can hardly stop you from playing whatever games you wish, Loki.” She sighed, her shoulders slumping again, tiredness leeching back into her tone. Loki did not know why this sudden change had come over her, but he was surprised by how little he liked it. He sighed, picking up his book again and sitting down on the edge of his bed.  
“I hardly think you capable of violence,” he said, deliberately opening it to the same page he had not been reading before. “But I suppose a murder may not be beyond you, if it were done in a fit of rage.”

He glanced over the top of the book, this time making no effort to hide it; Johnny smiled, shaking her head.  
“Perhaps I shall win this game, after all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't normally like to beg for reviews, but I'm going through a rough patch, writing-wise, right now, so if you like what you read, do please tell me! Writers have crippling self-doubt issues, you know.


	6. Games of Trust

After so long alone in silence, some days Johnny found that waking up to the slow, erratic sound of pages turning to be nothing less than grating. The silence between shuffling paper was just varied enough to feel like it _should_ be a rhythm, and yet wasn’t one. She did not think herself paranoid enough to assume that Loki was doing that on _purpose_ , but the thought had occurred to her that he might be. She had little way of knowing _what_ he doing anymore, his behaviour had changed so much; perhaps that, too, made her a little on edge.  
Her sleep had been unpleasant, full of dark, fractured dreams, and her legs hurt more today than was usual, and so if she was not in the best mood, she would like to be forgiven for it.

“Must you do that?” she demanded, despising how forced and thin her voice sounded. Loki looked up from his book, seeming genuinely startled by her outburst.  
“I’m only reading,” he said mildly, raising an eyebrow at her. Johnny sighed, offering him a small, guilty smile, which he accepted with a nod and without comment. “You seem a little… tense,” he said, but it was only a gentle tease, one that Johnny found herself smiling faintly at. She was thinking of the best way to explain away her foul mood when Loki gestured with his book lazily, smirking. “Perhaps I should read to you. It’s quite an interesting text.”  
Johnny leaned closer, squinting at the title etched into the spine of the book. Then she huffed a quiet laugh to herself, leaning back against the wall with a thump.  
“I found it rather dry,” she admitted. Loki grinned, closing the book with a snap, apparently finding her more interesting.  
“Ah, Johnny,” he said, smiling at her. “And here I wasn’t sure you knew _how_ to read.”

His words held none of that sharp, cutting edge he reserved for _true_ offense, but all the same, she bristled at it. Being well read had never put her in good standing with many of the servants, but it was something she had always taken a kind of pride in. Private, secretive pride, but pride all the same.  
“I _like_ to read,” she snapped. Loki looked hurt and returned to his book, and Johnny suddenly realised that she was being deeply unfair. Ever since the prince had apparently decided to be kinder to her, she had been waiting for him to stop, for the point where the trick made itself clear and she would be mocked for believing it. She was _baiting_ him, trying to force an unkindness that was never going to come.

This prison had changed her, and she didn’t like it.

“That is…” she began slowly. Loki did not look up from his book, but he did stop in the middle of turning a page, waiting for her to continue. “I did like to read very much, but it has been some time since I have been granted the opportunity.”  
“Hmm, I’d imagine not,” Loki agreed, finishing turning his page. Johnny got the distinct impression he was quite upset with her, though she could hardly blame him. “Yet you still see fit to disparage my book, I see.”  
“I _did_ find it rather dry,” she protested, because whether she had been unfair or not, she was hardly going to allow him to twist her words so obviously. Loki actually smiled to himself, so clearly he had done so on purpose. “Reading was a luxury for me as a servant. If a book did not interest me then I had no patience for it at all.”  
“You are so very cruel sometimes, Johnny,” Loki said. “You’re so…” he seemed at a loss for words for a moment, and then snapped his fingers in a dramatic gesture she supposed she was probably meant to recognise, but didn’t. “Sensible.”  
“Did you mean that as an insult?” She asked, a little unsure. He sighed, waving away her comment dismissively.  
“It’s boring. But I wasn’t aware you were a servant, Johnny. That does suggest a few possibilities to my mind…”  
“I fail to see any downside to being _sensible_ , Loki,” Johnny insisted, folding her arms. “It is generally considered an admirable quality.”  
“Generally, yes. That would be what makes it so boring.”  
“You’re quite impossible,” Johnny decided, shaking her head.  
“But not boring,” he said, licking his finger to turn a page. Johnny laughed quietly to herself, her throat aching a little, still not quite healed.  
“No, Loki, I don’t believe I could accuse you of that.”  
“Of course not, you’re a terrible liar.”

Loki seemed quite intent on describing her so insultingly today. It was almost enough to make Johnny reconsider her assumption that he was trying to be friendly, if not for the fact that everything he had said was technically a compliment.  
Though she was, she thought as she rubbed at her aching knee, probably a better liar than he realised. Or at least, she had always been uncommonly good at keeping secrets.

“There is no way you could know that,” she said. “When have I lied to you?”  
“Mm, it’s true you haven’t,” he admitted, lazily turning another page. “But I do consider myself something of an expert in these things. Trust me, Johnny, you’re a terrible liar.”  
“If Loki says it, surely it must be true…”  
“Glad to see you’ve finally realised that,” Loki said, grinning at her over the top of his book. “In any case, you’re terribly boring and terribly sensible, of course you couldn’t do anything so fun as _lie_ , Johnny.”  
“I may yet surprise you,” she said, mostly to herself. Loki snorted, and she felt her face heat up with irritation. “Whether I can lie or not I cannot say, but you might have noticed I am perfectly capable of keeping secrets, Loki. Some of the things I’m hiding may surprise even you.”

In hindsight, it was not a thing she should have said; in some vain effort to convince Loki she was not so terribly boring as he thought, she may have given far too much away. That was becoming a habit.  
Loki grinned, carefully setting his book down and standing, walking closer to the front of his cell. With the distance of the corridor between them, it was not quite as if he was staring down at her, but it felt very much the same.  
“Is that so?” He asked softly. There was mischief in his eyes, and Johnny wasn’t sure if she was glad to see it there. “What secrets could you possibly have? That of your crime, of course, but I doubt that shall be all that surprising, once I guess it. What else could a creature like you be hiding?” He sneered, and Johnny resisted the urge to look away from the contempt on his handsome face. Just when she had allowed herself to believe this wasn’t coming back. “Well?”

Johnny swallowed, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. When she opened her eyes again, Loki was watching her expectantly, no longer sneering, but wearing an expression of polite, if mocking, interest.  
“If I told you now, you would hardly be surprised,” she managed to say, without even so much as a tremor in her voice, though she was sure he saw through her. After a beat of silence, Loki laughed, shaking his head a little in amusement as he smiled down at her.  
“I suppose that is true, isn’t it?” He chuckled again. “Very well then. Surprise me.”

She forced herself not to look away, meeting his cold glare as best she could; after a moment, Loki smirked, turning away.  
“That’s what I thought,” he said airily. Johnny scowled, but she found herself more annoyed at herself than at him. He’d offered her a test - a cruel one, perhaps, but one she had failed.

She slumped back against the wall, trying to find some satisfaction in the knowledge that she had been right not to trust him. It hardly helped; she felt foolish for even having _wanted_ to believe, and oddly betrayed, for all that she had doubted.  
“Johnny,” Loki said suddenly. She lifted her head, blinking her eyes rapidly, even though she did not _think_ that there were tears there. Loki was reading his book again, not even looking at her. “Do try not to fall for _every_ lie, would you please? That really would be boring. Though I do look forward to these apparent surprises of yours.”

Despite herself, Johnny smiled thinly, ducking her head again. Perhaps not so foolish, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feeling much better after your comments and reviews last week :3 (You should keep doing that, for sure.)


	7. Family

The first time Loki’s mother visited him he was surprised; Odin had promised he would never see her again. Too surprised to feel much else of anything, though he suspected he rather _should_ be an emotional mess in her presence. Mostly he had felt tired, drained and empty of most powerful emotions. That was likely a disappointment to his mother, who had seemed so desperately happy to see him, but then, hadn’t he always been a disappointment to her?  
She had stayed only a few minutes before making her excuses and leaving him to his cage, and Loki hardly expected to see her again, after that. It was vindicating, really; finally, proof that he was so far gone even his beloved mother had given up on him.  
He had barely thought to glance over in Johnny’s direction until after Frigga had left, only to discover that his… companion? playmate, perhaps - that Johnny had curled further in on herself, her head bowed and her arms wrapped tight around her body like a shield. She was trembling.

His first reaction was delight at the sight of her so distressed. That was when he had finally begun to see that something was wrong with him. It was as if something had been inside his head and changed things, changed him to take pleasure in the suffering of others, when he felt sure he had never done so before, not truly. In revenge, perhaps, but not in suffering for suffering’s sake.  
Sometimes Johnny looked at him like she knew his reactions were wrong. Like she knew him to be better than his current state. He had wished she would look at him thus in that moment, to confirm his suspicions, but she did not stir, not even when he spoke her name. He said it again, louder, and when she still did not react he turned away in deep dissatisfaction, hating her anew for getting so far under his skin he could _feel_ her there.

He had hated her for days after that, refusing to speak to her, except to bait and torment her. He’d known there was something wrong with him, but he’d _committed_ to it, tried to make it fit easily even as it only felt more and more unpleasant.  
When he could no longer continue that way, his anger finally passing and letting him see clearly for the first time in over a year, perhaps there was guilt in the way he reached out to her with those few scraps of kindness he had left to give. Perhaps there was relief in that she took them.

They had settled into routine, speaking whenever they disliked the silence, trading barbs with no real sting to them, testing each other. He liked to think that Johnny was improving, that he was teaching her the dual arts of sarcasm and wit, unearthing her small talents in that area and honing them. Amusing himself by bettering her. And by seeking out her secrets, of course, one by one, and stealing them. Stealing _her_ , piece by piece, like the liar and the thief that he was.  
There was no happiness in their routine, but there was contentment, born from distraction if nothing else.

The second time Frigga visited, Loki was just angry. If she was to be denied him then _let her be denied him_ , not this shade that broke the fragile calm of his routine and forced him to see himself as she saw him: with sadness and with pity. He knew how contemptible he was, he did not need to be reminded.  
“I never asked for your _pity_ ,” he spat, glaring at the projection of his mother as if he wished he could reach through the magic and cause the queen true harm - perhaps he did, for an instant, and then his eyes caught movement as Johnny curled in on herself, and his temper died in his throat.  
His mother half turned, curious as to what he was looking at behind her, and Loki felt a sudden fierce need to protect whatever it was he had with Johnny, even if he did not know precisely what that was. Friendship, or something less. Companionship at the very least, with Johnny more and more willing to indulge his need for conversation with every passing day.  
It didn’t matter what she was; she was his and his alone, and he would not let his mother see her and take this from him too, as his false family had always taken everything. And so he distracted her with sadness only mostly faked, playing on her instinct to mother and protect him. Forcing himself to play the part she wanted him to play: the lost, broken son. She answered it gladly, and he settled into his part, even if he could find little comfort in it. As much as his mother did love him, she had never known what he needed, or seen anything beyond what she had wanted to see. It was easy to resent her for that.

“Johnny,” he said, when his mother was gone; this time she looked up at him, her eyes clouded with tears. “Tell me, why do you weep?”  
“Because I miss my mother, Loki,” she snapped at him, slamming a hand on the floor. “And you cannot even look at yours.”  
“She is not my mother.”  
“Then what have we between us, but sorrow?”  
Loki sighed, sitting down by the energy field, back to the wall, as he had grown accustomed to; Johnny laughed roughly, hunching her shoulders over.  
“Smile for me,” he implored her, sudden and impulsive; Johnny looked up at him, her brow furrowed in confusion. “Smile, Johnny.” He wanted her to smile, to willingly give him one more piece of herself to keep.  
“What reason have I to smile?”  
“Because I wish it of you. I like your smile.”

Johnny did not smile, unhooking her hair from behind her ears to shroud her face again. But her arms uncurled from around her body and her spine straightened back against the wall again. Disobedient as it was, that was still more than enough to satisfy him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it's not clear, the first part of this chapter took place sometime before the last two. Perhaps Frigga's first visit had a little something to do with Loki being a little nicer to Johnny...
> 
> You guys know the drill, comments and reviews make me happy and happy Bobs are a good thing.


	8. Questions with no Answers

“I really should hate to think you capable of murder,” Loki said one day, quite out of the blue. They had been discussing a book he had been reading, one she had read herself long ago, and the change of subject confused Johnny for a moment. And then she remembered. The guessing game.  
“And why should you?” She asked, rubbing absently at her knee. It hurt more and more every day she strove to hide it from him, but Loki could not find out about her legs. Now more than ever, he couldn’t find out what had been done to her down here.  
She was beginning to fear what he might do if he found out. The quiet, vicious intensity of his youth had only grown sharper with age… and his recent madness. She did not know if he really cared for her at all, but if he did, it was more important than ever that he never find out how badly she had been treated.  
“Well, you are so very lovely,” he remarked, his smile charming. “Too lovely to lower yourself to such tactics, surely.”  
“And what tactics might I employ instead?”  
“Charm, perhaps?” Loki suggested idly, tilting his head. Johnny actually snorted with laughter, looking at him like she thought him mad. She did, a little. “Ah, I see your point, my dear.”  
“I am incapable of charm,” Johnny decided, leaning her head back against the wall.  
“I would not go so far as that,” Loki teased. Johnny found herself having to look away from his smile. It was too close to real. “Not a murderer, then?”  
“No, Loki, I am not a murderer.”  
“Ah, and so you remain a mystery. I was hasty before; you do seem to be excellent at keeping your secrets, don’t you?”  
Johnny shook her head fondly, saying nothing.  
“Well, not a murderer then. I’m glad of it.” He smiled at her. “Terrible thing, to take a life. I think you lack the stomach for it.”

If Johnny was meant to be offended by that, she wasn’t. Somehow, she did not think she was meant to be. Perhaps, in his own way, Loki was only trying to tell her he thought her better than that.  
Better than him, then? She knew he had killed. She knew he had done much worse than kill, and she knew that insecurity had plagued his life, that he never thought himself good enough. That he was driven by that.

“Why are _you_ here, Loki?” She fooled herself into thinking it was just an idle question, a way to turn the conversation away from herself. If she was a little curious to know what she had missed of Loki’s inevitable fall from grace, that couldn’t hurt.

He looked up, startled by her question. She could see it on his face, allowing herself a small smile at finally dragging a true emotion out of him. The first day they had spoken, when he had looked at her with utter rage and contempt and anger and broken pain hadn’t counted, because those emotions were true but they weren’t hers to claim. This surprise, wide-eyed and honest, this was only for her.

“What?”  
“Why are you here?” She repeated slowly, tilting her head at him in query. “What did you do that finally led to this?”  
“You don’t know?”  
“I have been kept here for too long to know. Why would I be told?”  
“I…” Loki stopped, crossing the cell to sit by the energy wall, his fingers trailing musically against the field. “I no longer know, for certain. So much happened, and so little of it was by my own will. That I am a monster is certain, and deserving of punishment, there can be no doubt, but for what, I… could not say. My actions on Midgard were guided by hands not my own, my actions here no product of my reason, and yet… my punishment seems just, does it not? By my own will or not, I have done such terrible things.”  
“You have,” she admitted; she had heard, in bits and pieces, through arguments Loki had with his mother - and he always seemed to argue with his mother - of some of the things he had done, by his own will or not. “Then this seems just even to you?”  
“I could not say,” Loki repeated. “I no longer know if this is punishment.”  
“What else could this be?”  
“A chance. You know they thought me dead, for a time?"  
Johnny swallowed, looking away. That she had known, the gossip spilling all the way down to her cell on whispers.  
It had broken what had been left of her heart.  
"I did," she said carefully, wary of what she might give away. "All rumours come down here eventually."  
"I think I meant to die. It's not clear to me now..." Loki sounded strange, his voice hollow and distant. "My memory of that time is... I know it to be false. I don't know what truth it replaced."  
"Such is the nature of lies," Johnny said. This was not a conversation she wished to have, for all that she had started it. If Loki saw her unease, he did not comment on it.  
"Yes, indeed," he agreed. "They cloud even my good judgement. You thought me dead, sweet Johnny, as everyone did?" He tilted his head at her, a smile playing on his lips.  
She could still hear the genuine want of an answer, hiding behind his careless tone.  
"Yes, I did."  
"Did you mourn me, Johnny?"

All pretense of disinterest dropped from his voice; the quiet words were so raw they _hurt,_ low in her chest. Johnny forced her eyes closed to stop her tears before they could even start, biting her tongue to keep it from telling the truth. Loki had gotten the better of her again, of course, twisting her bad habits against her, but just this once she had to control herself. This was a secret she _had_ to keep.  
"I had no strength to mourn a man I did not know," she said. It tasted like ash in her mouth. Green eyes bored into her, serious and knowing. Then Loki smiled, dispelling the mood with a wave of his hand.  
“It’s not important,” he said. She didn’t believe him. “Now tell me, Johnny, why are _you_ here?”

Johnny laughed. This time, it didn’t even hurt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why yes I do make up chapter titles on a whim. I'm awful like that. Reminder that leaving comments makes me happy as can be~


	9. Beauty and Lies

Loki knew, logically, that Johnny must move, sometimes. She could not spend every waking moment sitting in one place. Yet she must wait until he slept, because he never saw it. This he had known for some time, but he had been content to let her have that small secret to herself.  
But now what little secrets she gave away while they spoke were no longer enough to appease his need to possess her. It was time to start taking the deeper, darker things she fought to conceal. Of course, if he were to own her as utterly as he desired, some of it would need to be willing given. He could steal her little secrets, yes, but in the end she would have to give herself over.  
He had faith that she would. For now, he had a secret to steal.

“Do you ever sleep?” he asked her lazily, laying on his side on his bed, watching her. She sighed, rolling her shoulders stiffly.  
“No.”  
“Did anyone ever tell you how beautiful you are when you lie?”  
“Who else would find lies beautiful but you, Loki?”  
“Hmm.” He hummed in vague agreement. “And yet, still you are beautiful. Quite bad at it, but beautiful.”  
“You think I am a fool who believes the trickster’s tongue?” Johnny asked, her voice softening as so often it did when she thought he was on the edge of sleep. Soothing him. Her tones had evened out with use, no longer the unpleasant rasp of their first weeks together. “Or so starved of compliments I will blindly take yours?”  
“I think you are beautiful when you lie,” he insisted with a sleepy sigh. “Whatever else you may think that I think is no concern of mine, Johnny, dear.”  
“Go to sleep, Loki.”  
“And here I thought I was.”

Loki let his breathing slow, his head falling limp against the pillow. And he waited. Long minutes passed, and then the rustling of fabric alerted him to her movement, soft and muted in the silence of the dungeons. He waited a moment more before cracking open an eye, watching her across the hall as Johnny pushed herself slowly to her feet, her legs crooked and trembling under her weight, one foot twisted unnaturally against the floor.  
He had to bite his tongue to force himself to stay silent, shocked by what he saw.

Johnny was as short as he’d always imagined she was, but at least some of her height was stolen away by the way her knees would not straighten, not entirely. Her legs were thin, covered in tiny, angry scars - in places he could see where bone sat wrong under skin, breaks that had never healed. Head bowed, she leaned against the wall to keep herself upright, taking a few slow, painstaking steps. Without magic, and without the attention of healers, Johnny had been pushed far beyond her body’s ability to heal, and left to suffer.  
It was ugly. Painfully so. Loki dimly remembered a time he would have been pleased to see her ugliness. He would have revelled in it, because her misery would amuse him, because… because something had made him so confused he could no longer separate anger from cruelty. But her ugliness did not please him now. He felt sick.  
“I know you are watching me,” Johnny said quietly, head still bowed. Her voice was shaking, but sure. Loki lifted his head, letting himself examine the way her shapeless tunic hung from her body, the way her thin arms trembled with strength against the wall, her hair around her face. Perhaps she was not so entirely ugly after all.  
“What did this?” The words stuck in his throat.  
Johnny tilted her head, looking over at him through a curtain of hair, her eyes shining in the light.  
“The guards tired of my insolence even more readily than you did.”  
“I shall never tire of your insolence,” Loki said absently, sitting up on his bed. “Sitting as you do does not serve you well.”  
“What else would you have me do?” she demanded, her palms flat against the wall as she hobbled closer to the open energy wall, staring out at him with… well, insolence. How perfectly lovely. “Allow me my dignity - or would Loki take even this and leave me with nothing?”  
“To steal your dignity is not my desire,” Loki told her, realising with a start that he was trying to soothe her, his voice softer than he’d intended. “But your health -”  
“What worth are my legs, when I shall never leave this cell?”  
“Every part of you has worth, Johnny.”  
Johnny laughed bitterly, shaking her head and stumbling slightly. Loki fisted his hands against the sheets of his bed to keep from reaching out to steady her.  
“I am of no worth to anyone.”  
“You are to me,” he admitted softly, praying she would not hear him. Johnny just smiled, leaning one shoulder heavily against the energy wall, yellow ripples of magic flowing across her skin and distorting her face.  
“And what worth are you?” She spoke not with cruelty, but with brutal honesty. It felt just the same to him.  
“... I am none.”

They stared at each other across the suddenly vast gap between them, Johnny still trembling as she struggled to hold her own weight, Loki only able to watch her through his lashes, his head hanging in something he half-recognised as shame.  
“You are to me,” Johnny whispered across the hall, her face grim. “Go to sleep, Loki.” When he stared at her blankly she smiled, her eyes fluttering closed. “Lay down and close your eyes, dear.”

He did so, listening to her grunt and hiss as she settled herself back down against the wall.  
“Do not hide from me?” He asked, forcing himself not to make it a plea.  
“I am not hiding, Loki.”

There was a beat of silence between them, thick and uncomfortable.  
“The damage is permanent?” He could not help but ask, smiling to himself at her tired sigh. “My apologies, dear Johnny. Would it better please you if I never asked? If I pretended that I did not know? You must know I’m a skilled enough actor. This need never trouble us again, if you but ask.”  
He knew there there was an edge to his tone that she couldn’t mistake, but at least the truth of his question would be made clear: would she make him wear a mask, like everyone else? The dutiful son, the loving brother… the uncaring cellmate? He could do it, if she made him. But she would have to make him.  
If that was selfish, so be it.

“Go to sleep, Loki,” Johnny repeated. “I will see you in the morning.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one is up so late, today's been a bit hectic... just a bit. As always, comments make me happy and make me feel better about this story - which I need, since I'm falling behind on my editing, oops!
> 
> Next chapter is a good one, though... we finally get to find out what Johnny's crime was. Any guesses?


	10. Secrets

Her legs hurt less when she stretched them more and when Loki found out this fact, he insisted that she do so, and would not leave her alone until she did. The exercise itself was painful, but it lessened in time, and Johnny did feel a little foolish for letting it get so bad. It was only that it could have been so easy for Loki to react… differently. Although truthfully, she was no longer sure exactly what reaction she had feared.

The time passed. The guards might still belittle and insult her, but now she barely heard them. Instead of staring blankly at the ceiling as she once had, now she would tilt her head and meet Loki’s gaze across the hall, sharing a private smile at the trite words of the simple fools that thought they could hurt her.

They did not speak about crimes. Johnny found herself grateful that Loki had given up on his game, though it stung at her mind that she could not tell him everything about her, about the past, about her mother and all she lost. She wanted to share the truth with _someone_ , and he was all she had.  
But they did not speak about crimes, though they still spoke often. She suspected that Loki was avoiding the topic of _his_ past, rather than hers, now that he realised that she did not know the details. Of course, his biggest and darkest of secrets was one she had known for years, but she had long since decided not to tell him. It wasn’t her place.

Sometimes his mother would visit, and Johnny would make herself very small, and pretend that she did not notice Loki shooting her secretive, possessive glances. They didn’t talk about those visits, either.  
There was a lot they didn’t talk about, for all that they rarely went a day without talking.

“Well, the only thing I haven’t guessed is treason.”  
Johnny was surprised that Loki would return to this game after so long, but she tried not to let it show, rolling her eyes and ignoring him.  
“Though I can hardly imagine that _you_ would try to kill the king.”  
Johnny stumbled, nearly falling over and catching herself just in time against the wall, making Loki twitch in surprise and concern.  
“Are you-” he started to ask, standing. Johnny cut him off with a laugh, shaking her head.  
“I thought you were known to be intelligent, Loki?” she asked, lowering herself to the floor. “And yet in all these months you only now guess at the truth.”  
“You…?” He gaped at her, staring at her blankly across the hall. “Why? Surely you knew you could not succeed?”  
“I knew. But I had to try.”  
“But-”  
“My mother is dead because of him!” She snapped, regretting the harshness as soon as she’d said it, the lost confusion on her friend’s face almost too much to bear. She knew him well enough to know that he had never considered her like this - as a killer, as an angry creature so driven by revenge. He’d thought her better than this, even if he’d never said so. She did so hate to shatter his trust in her, but it must be done.  
Even if he could never again be the man he was once, she still hated to hurt him. The man he was now was so much harder to hurt, and that only made it worse that she could.

There was sympathy in his expression as he asked her what had happened. Perhaps if there hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have told him. About her mother going to war against the Jotun. About how she had never come home again. Of the truths that Johnny had uncovered later, working as a servant in the palace - that her mother had not been the only Valkyrie sacrificed to end that war, that their deaths had never been necessary, not really. Only expected.  
She did not tell him the other secrets she had found, the little lies and deliberately forgotten truths that, as far as she knew, no one else had ever pieced together. It had never mattered to her, what Loki was, but she doubted she could ever totally convince him of that.

“He thought of her as a living shield, easily replaced.”  
“She _was_ a soldier. Soldiers die in wars, surely you cannot hold the king personally responsible for every one who fell in battle? If she were a warrior -”  
“She was my mother,” Johnny insisted. “Perhaps I can never avenge her. But I had to try.”  
While they had been talking, Loki had been pacing, but now he sat down on the edge of his bed, staring down at his hands. He mumbled something to himself, too low for her to hear.  
“Loki?”  
His head snapped up to look at her, green eyes narrow and startled for a moment, as if he had forgotten she was there. Then his shoulders slumped again, and he looked back down.  
“Yes?”  
“Something is wrong?”  
“Of course not,” he told her, faking a smile. It was quite the poorest attempt at a smile she had ever seen from him, which was worrying.  
“Tell me what is wrong.”  
“Nothing,” Loki lied with an irritated huff, laying down with his back to her.  
“Loki-”  
“Oh, _do_ be quiet!” He snapped over his shoulder at her, stunning her into silence.

Johnny sighed to herself, curling her legs underneath her and settling back against the wall in her traditional pose. It felt more uncomfortable than she remembered it being. For long moments she listened for any sound from the other cell, but Loki was silent.  
“Loki?”  
“I prefered you when you had the good sense not to speak out of turn,” Loki said, but there was no real irritation or malice in his voice, only… maybe sadness, squashed down so far she could only hear a ghost of it.  
“I have never possessed such good sense.”  
“Then I have never prefered you.”  
“I am not sure if that is the insult you intend it to be, Loki,” Johnny sighed. “What is this? I had thought you’d be pleased with your game.” He didn’t answer her. “Loki!”  
“Be quiet! The guards will come to silence you.”  
“I shall not! Tell me what is wrong, Loki, I-”  
“Are you so blind?” Loki snarled, sitting up to glare at her. His hair fell across his face and for once he truly looked wild, angry. Johnny was still not afraid of him, but she saw once again the madness lurking beneath the pretty surface, and thought perhaps she _should_ be afraid. “If her death is the king’s fault, is it not mine?”  
“Because you…” She sighed, smiling sadly at him. “Loki, I do not blame a child for being born. No matter who… or perhaps what… he is. Set it from your mind, my dear?”  
“I…” Loki blinked, slowly brushing the hair from his face. “I am not dear to you.”  
“I did not take you for a fool, Loki.”

“Have you always known?” he asked her after a few moments. Johnny tilted her head in query, and Loki grimaced, glancing away. “Of my… heritage.”  
“Not always. But…” She sighed, shuffling closer to the open wall. “When I was a servant, I watched you, to see if you knew… and when I found you did not, I… it seemed unkind of them.”  
“You could have told me.”  
“Would you have believed the lies of an ugly servant girl?”  
“Certainly not,” Loki agreed, favouring her with a charming smile that did not have to ring true to reassure her. “But from one so pretty as you, perhaps…”  
“You did not always think me pretty,” Johnny said, and then winced, cursing herself for letting it slip. Loki stood from the bed, moving closer to her with a curious frown.  
“I did not?” he asked, voice low. “How regretful. I do hope my careless words did not sting too badly, dear Johnny?” Placing one hand on his chest, he gave her a half bow, smiling sweetly. “Forgive me my past sins, will you not?”

Johnny smiled, shaking her head slightly.  
“Of course, Loki. Your sins are quite forgiven,” she told him, wondering if he would realise that she meant _all_ his sins - that the grumbled words of a prince to an awkward, clumsy servant girl were nothing compared to what she was willing to forgive him. After all, her own history was hardly clean of sin.  
From the sincerity of his startled, boyish smile, it seemed he did realise.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kind of nervous about this one, if I'm honest! This was always Johnny's crime, right from the very beginning of me writing this story, and there are a few hints and things that make sense with this new context but I don't think you guys were any more likely to guess than Loki was...
> 
> As always, let me know what you think with a comment!


	11. The Reasons Why

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mild warning: this chapter marks the start of Loki occasionally saying/thinking sexual/inappropriate things, because he's kind of the worst like that. While this story will never become especially explicit, I will be including these small warnings at the top of any chapters with this kind of mild adult content, so that no one is blindsided by it.

Loki had been musing on an important question for some time now: when, and why, had he ever led Johnny to believe that she was not a pretty thing, easily admired?

He had other questions, yes, regarding her recently revealed secrets, but those were… difficult. Not questions he wished to dwell on, for the moment. He had no love left for his fa… for _Odin_ , and could easily see the truth behind Johnny’s story, that a ruthless king might have sacrificed warriors without a thought for their families, their children. Their daughters. Harder to understand was the idea of Johnny, sensible, quiet, doubtful Johnny, plotting treason, plotting _murder…  
_ Harder still, the thought that she knew who he was, _what_ he was, had always known and had never cared.

No, not something he wished to dwell upon. So he mused on the other question instead, one that was equally important, to his mind. He did not doubt her claim, of course - for if she were but a serving girl, her feelings would naturally have been little consequence to him, and he would have said anything he liked. But that she was not pretty? Surely he would found an insult that was not such a transparent lie?

The only explanation was that she must have been still a girl, not yet a young woman growing into her beauty; for if she had been, his insults would surely have been of a… baser nature.  
In fact… he glanced over at her, curled up on her side on the floor of her cell, sleeping peacefully, and wondered if perhaps that was not a more likely truth: that he had spied her as a young woman, quite perfectly his type, and bedded her once before moving on to the next pretty thing. If that were so, then a lie now would serve her dignity, her anger at him for discarding her…

With a faint smirk, he tried to picture it: Johnny as she once must have been, legs whole and strong, her skin a little tanned from the sun perhaps, hair glossy and healthy, not lank and pale from the darkness of the dungeons. How she would have been, pretty and passive beneath him, a servant submitting to the whims of her prince…  
It didn’t fit. He could not imagine her that way - could not help but let his mind wander, thinking how she would scratch, bite, pull at his hair and growl demands, how…  
Loki shook his head, putting the images from his mind. That… none of that… was relevant now. But if he could not picture her as it would have been - if he could not imagine such a thing properly - it most likely never happened. In any case, Johnny was a terrible liar, and hardly the type to hide any anger she might hold for him; if he had scorned her, she would rather have condemned him for it than covered it up with shame. That brought him back to the original question: when had he told Johnny she was ugly, and what exactly had possessed him to do so?

Irritated at himself, he lay down on his bed, determined to get some sleep. It was pointless to keep himself up over an incident so small he didn’t even remember it. Even if Johnny clearly did. It was so long past, it could hardly affect them now.

Rest was a long time coming. When he finally did sleep, his dreams were plagued with half formed memories of a small serving girl, hair so blonde it was white in the firelight of the dining halls of Asgard, her face a timid mass of freckles as she clumsily spilled the wine. The memories were hazy, but when everyone laughed, Loki could only remember relief that they were not laughing at him, not sympathy for the girl. When she passed him, face red with embarrassment behind all those dark freckles, he’d tripped her, spilling the girl - and what was left of the wine - onto the hard floors to riotous laughter from the people around them.  
He’d insulted her then, yes. That he did remember clearly, because the words had been a skillful lie, one that had taken effort to trip so smoothly from his silver tongue, for the girl glaring tearfully up at him was a pitiful thing, but not a hideous one. Perhaps even a lovely thing, one day, when she grew into her too-round cheeks and too-big eyes.  
But in that moment, she was just a way to avoid being the centre of attention, just a little while longer.

When he woke, Loki could only curl into himself, burning with shame. He wanted to believe the dream was just a fiction of his mind, just a lie he told himself to try and answer a seemingly impossible question. But it rang so true, fractured in the way of old memories, coloured with his past life and all it’s guilts and unhappinesses. It felt real, a scrap of the past dredged up by his subconscious mind to answer the question that plagued it.

He turned over in his bed, looking across at Johnny. She was sitting against the wall again, her eyes closed, but from her breathing and the pained frown on her face he was certain she’d just been exercising, which meant she was awake. For a moment, he wondered if his sleep had been obviously troubled. If she had seen or heard some kind of distress, that would be… unfortunate. Embarrassing.

“Johnny?” he said softly, still laying there as if he could pretend to be asleep still.  
She tilted her head half towards him, a smile pulling at her lips.  
“I never… that is to say…” he sighed, burying his face against the pillow in irritation. Of all the times for words to fail him. Across the hall, Johnny laughed, a soft, sweet sound that he had grown to adore over the months, a far cry from the rough sound she had spat at him in the first days of their acquaintance. And yet… even that angry, pained laugh had been a wonderful thing, for how much feeling it had behind it, and how much pain.  
“You have always been beautiful,” he grumbled into the pillow; by the way Johnny just laughed harder, he suspected she heard him.  
“Flattery, now?” she asked, laughter still in her voice. Loki hummed, lifting his head to smile thinly at her.  
“Truth, perhaps.”  
“From you? I shall count it as a rare gift.”  
“See that you do,” Loki said, forcing himself to sit up lest he make a bigger fool of himself. “And don’t expect more of it.”  
“I don’t,” Johnny said simply, neither joking with nor judging him. It was curious, how easy she made it seem, expecting nothing of him. No one else had ever found it so simple.

“You must have known you would fail,” he said, those difficult, uneasy questions weighing too heavily on his mind, he had to give them voice. Johnny tilted her head back, her hair still tied in that braid across her shoulder. She looked younger like that. “Johnny. You are not that stupid.”  
“It was the only protest I could make,” she said, eyes closed. “I could not choose to do nothing. How could my mother rest, if I did nothing?”  
“You could have died.”  
Johnny shook her head, a small smile on her lips.  
“I knew I would never get that far. This was always going to be my fate.”  
“Johnny.” Loki would not stop saying her name until she _looked_ at him. This quiet acceptance made him uneasy. “You spent years plotting. Did you never once reconsider?”  
“Oh, many times,” she admitted. “I tried so many times to talk myself out of it. But how can anything change, if people do not protest that which they find unforgivable? So,” she said, turning her head to smile at him, eyes half open. “I could not change my mind until I forgave him. And I have yet to forgive him.”

Loki could perhaps find something admirable, if misguided, about the self-sacrifice of that. Nothing had changed because of Johnny’s small, personal protest, of course, but he found he could not quite fault her motives. Not when he had done so much worse for reasons much less noble.  
“Is there nothing you regret, then?” he asked. He expected her to say any one of those hollow things people seemed to crave so much: a life, a family of her own. He didn’t really care to hear her answer, but he wanted her to know he understood her reasons.  
“I should have told you,” Johnny said quietly, looking down and away from him. “I should have told you the truth, if no one else would.”  
“All that was taken from you,” Loki said, unable to keep the wonder from his voice. “All that you have lost, and you still think of me before yourself? No other regrets at all? No lover you might have married, life you might have lived?”  
She shook her head again, her shoulders rising in a loose shrug.  
“I always knew what I was giving up, my dear, and you have lost more than I ever had to lose. That I was always too much the coward to tell you, that is what I regret.”  
“You…” Loki muttered, guarding his surprise into playful respect. Nothing deeper than that. Not reverence. “You are a better creature than I could ever be, my dear Johnny.”  
“I am a coward,” Johnny said, but not harshly, still smiling. “Trying to kill the king was easy, knowing I would fail.”  
“You tried, it is more than anyone else ever did.”  
“Telling you the truth… I was afraid I would succeed,” Johnny said, fixing him with a meaningful look. Loki realised she was trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t fathom what. After a few helpless seconds, she sighed, looking away. “There was no life for me, Loki. What I have is enough.”

The present tense was not lost on Loki, warming him. He could not recall a time when he had ever been enough. He didn’t know how, but he would try, at least, to remain that way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One day I'm going to give all the chapters decent titles.
> 
> I'm hoping it won't happen, but this story may go on a short break in a couple of weeks while I finish up a couple of chapters I need to add. I was planning to have them done by now but depression is hitting me hard and I'm not having much luck writing anything I'm happy with.
> 
> As always, comments are much appreciated.


	12. Slow Shifting Sand

“You must have been plotting even then,” Loki mused, only a few hours later, his arms folded behind his head as he stared up at the ceiling. Johnny hummed curiously, opening her eyes to watch him as he toyed with a small object from his bedside table. “The day you spilled the wine.”  
“You caused me to spill the wine,” she corrected easily, hiding her lingering anxiety over that day, years ago. It had been one of the worst of her childhood, from beginning to end. The incident in the middle with the wine had been only a small part of it, but she could hardly deny that it had upset her deeply. Loki had been… even then, she had felt sympathy for him. And he was a handsome youth, even as he was handsome now, there was no denying that.  
“No, you had already spilled the wine. I just… made it worse,” he said mildly, smiling an easy smile at her. She rolled her eyes, pulling a childish face in his direction. “Manners, Johnny.”  
“I wasn’t plotting,” she said, ignoring his comment in favour of picking at the ragged hem of her tunic.  
“Oh, you weren’t?” Loki glanced over at her, tossing the object in his hand up into the air and catching it deftly. “Then what was a young and inexperienced serving girl doing at the royal table?”  
“Observing,” Johnny snapped, combing her fingers through her hair. “Making a fool of myself,” she added quietly, a moment later.  
“Hardly. _I_ made a fool of you, dear. I am sorry for that, you know.”  
“Loki Silvertongue is sorry?” Johnny said. As surprised as she was, she kept her voice quiet enough that the guards would not hear, though Loki winced anyway. “Surely Ragnarok nears.”  
“You mock me,” he grumbled, throwing his little object - what was it, an inkwell? Well sealed, she hoped - up into the air once again. “What were you observing? The eventual target of your treasonous schemes, your mother’s murderer?”  
“You.”

The inkwell hit Loki in the shoulder, cracking open and spilling black ink across his tunic, big dark drips splattering onto his bedsheets. Johnny bit back a giggle at the look of sheer baffled shock on his face at her statement.  
“You have ink on you, Loki.”  
He looked down at the stain, irritation colouring his features as he made an imperious gesture with one hand. Slowly, the ink seeped up out of the fabric it had spilled on, until it formed a small, perfectly round ball, the size of a marble, which clinked and clattered when Loki flicked it away across the floor. Johnny had never seen quite so delicate a display of casual magic before, and could hardly help but be enchanted herself, smiling as she began to pull a long thread from the hem of her tunic.  
“Beautifully done,” she commented softly. Loki inclined his head to her more, she suspected, out of habit than anything else.  
“Explain yourself,” he demanded, though his tone was far from rough. Johnny sighed, winding the thread loosely around her wrist and beginning to comb her hair over her shoulder. “What are you _doing?_ ”  
“Loki...” Johnny sighed again, shaking her head. “Gathering my thoughts.”  
“What in the nine realms has that to do with your hair?”  
“Nothing,” she said calmly, fingers still seeking out knots. For far too long she had ignored her appearance, but lately… vain as it was, she had someone to look at her and see more than simply a prisoner, and she was getting tired of looking so unkempt. “Would you rather hear about my hair, or the day with the wine?”  
“The wine, naturally. You were… observing me?”  
Johnny stopped fussing with her hair, glancing over at him curiously. Something in Loki’s voice had turned very vulnerable on those last two words, but his expression had not changed, and he was still sitting on the edge of his bed, turning the cracked inkwell over in his hands.  
“Yes, I was,” she said finally, going back to her hair. “They brought you back from the war; no one spoke about it, and everyone forgot as time passed, but I always remembered. Eventually I realised what it must mean.”  
“That I was…” Loki bit back the rest of that sentence, his jaw tight, and Johnny couldn’t help but sympathise. She always had, after all. That was what she was trying to explain.  
“I watched you, to see if you knew,” she explained quietly, fingers working quickly to separate her hair into three lengths. “I… I wished to know if you had caused my mother’s death, or if… you were as much a victim as she was.”  
“And what did you determine?”

Johnny paused, her braid half finished over her shoulder. She wasn’t sure that was a question she knew how to answer; the long practiced motions of braiding her hair couldn’t soothe her through this like she’d thought they would. She finished the braid anyway, tying it off with the thread from around her wrist and smoothing it flat against her shoulder.  
“I determined that you… were lonely,” she said slowly, staring at her hands. “And that you would not deign to listen to me, were I to try to-” She stopped talking.

‘Help you.’ ‘Befriend you.’ Anything she could say would sound hollow. They both knew it had never been possible - that she had only ever been a servant girl, and he had only ever been a prince. Even now, she was only a prisoner.  
He was still a prince. Neither of them could change that.

“That looks nice,” Loki said gently. She looked up to find him standing very close to the open wall of his cell, watching her with an expression she couldn’t quite read. Perhaps, she thought, he didn’t know either. “Your hair, it suits you well. It looks… nice.”  
“Thank you, my prince,” she murmured politely, bowing her head. Loki smirked, and bowed to her, far lower than a prince should ever bow to anyone, his hand folded gracefully across his chest.  
“My lady,” he said sweetly, every inch, for a moment, the beautiful young prince he should have been, smile delicate and reserved, face serene. Then he smirked his more devilish smile, and somehow, the illusion shattered, was more beautiful still.  
Johnny knew for certain then that Loki was trouble.

She knew equally that she was already too deep in love to care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My chapter titles continue to be absurd.
> 
> Good news! I do in fact have the chapter for next week, hopefully it'll be edited in time. Bad news! I don't have the one for the week after. I hope to get it done during the week but writing is never a sure thing. I'll let you know next week if there might be delays.
> 
> As always, please comment if you like it, even if you don't have much to say beyond 'I like it!'


	13. Magic

Bored as he was, Loki had resorted to playing with magic to amuse himself. Just little things, cheap tricks for the most part, toying with small scraps of his power to see what he might do with them. At first he kept to safe things: a handful of butterflies that turned to dust in the air, a few flowers that curled across the white floor of his cell. Yet somehow, it became fragments of dark memories. Snowflakes and unfamiliar stars.

He had quite forgotten Johnny was observing him at all, until she made a small delighted noise at the faint strains of music he conjured, half remembered from Germany. He glanced over at her with a raised eyebrow, smiling at her sheepish blush.  
“I did not know you could create music,” she explained. Loki inclined his head, the music fading away before it reached the part with the screaming.  
“It’s magic,” he said. “It can do most anything.”  
“Of course, but -”  
“An illusion is only a spell to trick the senses,” Loki continued, speaking slowly and patiently. “Hearing is a sense, is it not?”  
“You need not make me look the fool, Loki.”  
“Ah, now there is no great illusion,” he teased, but not unkindly. Johnny shook her head with a fond smile. “It’s only magic, Johnny.”  
“Spoken truly as someone who has never had to try,” Johnny sighed, her smile vanishing. “How easy it must be for you, when magic is only magic.”

She glanced down, playing quietly with the long, pretty braid over her shoulder, curling the strands around the tips of her fingers. Loki did not have to be such a skilled reader of people to guess what troubled her: some small magical talent of her own, never nurtured, never taught.  
What a shameful waste.

“I was a novice, once,” he told her. Perhaps a little encouragement would cure her frown. “When even the smallest of spells seemed quite beyond me. I did require a tutor, you know.”  
“I never had time for such things.” Her frown stayed.  
“Of course,” Loki agreed, searching for something more he might say. “Such a pity, that. I suspect you’d be quite good at it.” She scoffed at him, but he refused to be offended. She was only judging herself too harshly again. Dreadful habit, and one he’d have to break her of. “You have the kind of resolute focus it takes to sharpen a gift, my dear. Raw talent alone is never enough.”  
“That is easy for one with raw talent to say.”  
There was a kind of quiet yearning on her face, he thought, and it intrigued him. It had been some time since he seriously considered his magic at all; it was simple a truth to him, as natural as breathing. It was hard for him to see why another would covet it so. At the same time, a bitter part of him did not fail to notice that it was, of course, a woman who viewed his magic with such approval and longing - but he discarded that.  
It was far more important that it was _Johnny_.

“I could teach you,” he offered, again remaining unoffended when she only laughed. Still being hard on herself… now that, he would tolerate no longer. “I’m quite serious, my dear.”  
“And how are you to teach me when we are kept apart?” Johnny demanded, gesturing to the hallway between them with a sharp jerk of her hand. “I thought you were beyond mocking me.”  
"I assure you, I was not mocking. Magic requires neither contact nor closeness.”  
She hesitated, only for a moment, clearly searching for some new excuse.  
“I fear you would find me a poor student.”  
Maddening creature.  
“I very much doubt I could ever find you lacking,” he said coldly. “But if you’ve no wish to learn, I’ve no purpose in teaching you.”

Johnny’s face set hard and defiant, clearly offended by the suggestion she wasn’t interested. Loki contained his triumphant smile. Ah, his Johnny, how very predictable she could be.  
“I _would_ like to learn,” she insisted, her tone still a little doubtful. “My… my mother taught me some things.”  
“Show me,” Loki commanded, sitting down in the centre of his cell with his legs crossed under him, eyes on her. Johnny flushed under the attention, toying with the hem of her tunic. “I vow I shall judge you as I would any novice, and expect little.”  
“So kind,” Johnny muttered, closing her eyes and folding her legs awkwardly beneath her. It was good that she could not see him. He hardly wished her to become self-conscious now, or she would refuse to show him her little magics, and he very much did wish to see.

Lifting her hands in a simple but not incorrect casting gesture, Johnny’s face slipped into an expression of intense focus. A light, small and faint, curled around each of her fingertips and then spread evenly over her palms, neither dimming nor flickering as it grew. It stayed steady on top of her palms, never bleeding down over the edges of her hands or wrists, the surface disturbed by faint ripples like it was water.  
“Good control,” Loki observed. Startled by the sound of his voice, Johnny’s light flickered and died, her eyes opening. “Hmm. Maybe not.”  
“You distracted me!” she said hotly. Loki knew his smirk was only embarrassing her further, but he couldn’t help himself. Johnny huffed, folding her arms and looking away.

“Truly, dearest, that was well done,” Loki assured her, colouring his tones with sweet persuasion. Johnny grunted, but the line of her shoulders softened, and Loki grinned to himself. So _very_ predictable. “You led me to expect the clumsy attempt of a novice,” he added, with a smile. “You deceived me.”  
“You swore you were not judging me, Loki!” Johnny was still turned away, but from her tones it was clear she was trying not to laugh.  
“And I say I was not, but you did make certain claims of your abilities, after all. Tell me, Johnny, do you know how very harshly you judge yourself?”  
Johnny was quiet for a long moment, and then seemed to compose herself, turning back to face him. A pity, really, that she apparently had no intent of addressing his question. He’d have liked to know her answer.  
“All this, and from a failed spell?” she asked, voice guarded. Loki held back a sigh.  
“I distracted you. Try it again?”  
Johnny did not seem convinced. This time, Loki did sigh, letting his small frown of regret show through.  
“For me, please?” he asked her gently. She regarded him curiously for a moment, and then nodded.

“My mother says it is for lighting one’s way,” she explained, settling back into her casting stance. “I am supposed to be able to focus the light to a single finger, to make it brighter.”  
“With practice, you shall. And much more, I imagine. The same spell might be modified to give off heat, or a flash to blind an enemy… there is so much that can be done with only the simplest of spells. Of course, magic may do whatever you wish, if you know how to convince it to obey.”  
“Oh, of course,” Johnny replied mockingly.  
“The spell, Johnny.”  
“This hardly seems worth it,” she said, but closed her eyes again, the light spreading over her fingers more rapidly this time. Either she found it easier the second time, or her irritation was fueling her magic.  
“Your mother taught you this?” Loki asked, pleased when the light did not falter. “Was she well versed in magic, then?”  
He tried to keep the question casual, but he _was_ curious. Johnny was still remarkably tight-lipped on the subject of her mother.  
“Only a little. Practical magics, I think. That which was useful to a warrior, no more than that.”  
“Pity she did not teach you something of the healing of wounds.”

Johnny glanced down at the scars littering her legs, her cheeks flushing, and Loki cursed himself for speaking without thinking. It was unlike him. The light on her palms flickered, but did not go out.  
“My apologies,” Loki said quickly, “I only meant that-”  
“It’s alright, Loki.”  
“It would have saved you some suffering,” he finished quietly. Johnny smiled thinly, eyes falling closed again.  
“Certainly it would have. But I do not think my mother knew much of such things.”

She looked so very peaceful, the light shining up onto her face, softening her already soft cheeks. So beautiful.  
“Truthfully, neither do I,” Loki admitted, forcing himself to look away. Her eyes were closed. She would not see. “Only the ways to heal myself, not others, and it is a difficult thing to teach.”  
“How did you learn?”  
“I discovered it myself. It is like another kind of illusion, only… real,” he explained, knowing it was lacking. “I began by hiding my hurts, and then…”  
“Yes, you’re very good at that,” Johnny said quietly. “Hiding your hurts.”  
Loki did not care to address that, searching for some other, more easy conversation.  
“It is as I said, so many seemingly complex magics come from the most humble beginnings.”

He heard a small sigh, and when he looked back at her her hands had fallen into her lap again, the light gone. Her eyes eased open slowly, as if coming out of a trance; in many ways, she was.  
“It’s so complicated,” she complained. Loki smiled, shaking his head.  
“It is magic. It is the most simple and the most complex thing in all the nine realms.” His smile only grew when Johnny huffed and narrowed her eyes at him, her nose wrinkling as it always did. “But we shall start with the simple. The light, how do you do it?”  
“I…” Johnny unfolded her legs, rubbing at the stiff joints with a pained expression. “I picture a well of light within me, just underneath the surface, and imagine that it might somehow flow like water, seeping out from my skin.”  
“Hmm. Not a bad idea… a little simplistic, perhaps. You may yet find it limiting.”  
“Then what do _you_ do, when you cast magic?” she demanded.

Loki, never one to resist showing off, effortlessly copied her trick with the light, letting it flow from one finger to the next until it coated his hands. Unlike Johnny’s pure, untainted white light, Loki’s was green.  
“I, too, have a wellspring of power, my dear, but mine is not in my skin. It is not in my body at all, but in the entire universe, all of it connected to me, that I may do whatever I wish with it. A light on my hand, or in the air…” With a flick of his wrist, he let the light rise from his skin, hovering inches above his raised fingertips. “Or even on _your_ hand. It is all the same to me.”  
Johnny gasped softly as the light green light vanished and reappeared in her palm, raising her fingertips to cradle it as delicately as if it were his own heart she held, not some scrap of magic.  
“You are connected to everything?” she asked quietly, awed.  
“All things, at all times. You are not part of the universe, dearest Johnny. The universe is part of you.”  
“I… am not sure I shall ever see it that way. It is too unbelievable.”  
“I’m told it is a matter of preference, different to every person. See it as you will.” He directed the little light to curl around her hand, warming the skin. The look of pleasure on her face was deeply rewarding. “We all have our ways. It is a thing that must be discovered for oneself, and no two people will ever see, or cast, magic in the same way. But, a little gentle guidance…”  
“I think you are confusing what is true for you for what is true for everyone,” Johnny muttered. Loki allowed her to hold his little light caged in her hand a moment longer, and then dispelled it, ignoring the reluctant he was to do so.  
“I suppose I might,” he granted. “Shall we find out?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next few chapters are a bit of a lull, I think, just some quiet stuff before things move along again. Or as much as anything moves along in this admittedly slow paced fic.
> 
> News: I was hoping to finish next week's chapter this week... and then I got sick. I'm fine, but my energy is totally sapped right now, and the chapter is only about half done. So I'm afraid I cannot promise a chapter next Friday, but if it doesn't go up then, it will go up as soon as it's done and beta'd and cleaned up, no matter what day that is.  
> In related news, this fic now has a tumblr! http://smallcriminals.tumblr.com/ is where you can get updates on how done chapter 14 is, ask me questions, poke Johnny and/or Loki, or just say hi. It's pretty sparse right now, my energy levels being what they are, but it should hopefully be a good place. Do please drop by~
> 
> And as always, I'd love any comments. Either here or at the tumblr, you now have options!


	14. Nightmare

Johnny wasn’t sleeping. Sometimes it felt as if she went for days without being tired enough to sleep, as the hours stretched on uncounted, timeless in the unchanging dungeons. Loki, however, seemed to take to sleeping as a distraction. In a way she envied him his ability to simply lay down and sleep, no matter how tired he may be. But his frequent naps did leave her without anyone to keep her company, and today she felt particularly alone.

She had tried, at first, to occupy herself with practicing some of the magic he’d been teaching her lately. She didn’t take to illusions nearly as well as he did, of course, but she was beginning to manage a few of the smaller tricks almost easily now, though she could hardly say that she’d mastered them. _Loki_ would say that, but just because she found herself once again foolish enough to fall in love with him, it did not mean she had to fall for his flattery. She could be in love with him and still be aware of who he was, and what he was capable of.

Practicing magic alone lost its appeal, when she had no one to keep her from her thoughts, and no one to lift her spirits after her inevitable failures. And so more often than not she found herself returning to her oldest pastime: observing Loki.

He was very peaceful when he slept, laying on his back with his hands folded over his chest. Johnny knew that, given a bed to sleep in, she herself had the habit of sprawling awkwardly across all available space, but Loki remained dignified even when resting. Beautiful, too; Johnny knew for a fact that it must be an illusion, how neat he was, the healthy glow still on his skin, the tidy cut of his hair. She _knew_ what a person looked like after almost a year in the dungeons, and Loki looked too good. He was serving his pride again.  
But he had always been beautiful, and she knew he was aware of it. Likely he was aware that she thought him so, but that was… fine. He was probably flattered, vain creature that he was.

As long as it was only his appearance he thought she admired, she could let herself look.

The hours slipped away, and Johnny let herself watch as Loki drifted deeper into sleep. He curled slowly onto his side, so that all she could see was the line of his shoulders, but watching Loki was a kind of meditation to her, no matter how little she could see. Absurd as it was, it reminded her of the better parts of her childhood. Watching him be at peace was peaceful.

And so when the peace was broken, she noticed it instantly.  
It started with a faint whimper. If it weren’t for the dead silence of the dungeons, she might have thought she was imagining it: the smallest sound of distress, muffled so that it took Johnny a moment to realise it was coming from across the hallway.  
“Loki?” She kept her voice low, unwilling to wake him if he was still asleep. There was no answer, except for the whimpering. Johnny lifted herself heavily to her feet, moving closer to the open wall of her cell to listen. They were isolated here in their little corner, but sound could sometimes carry back this far, especially when everything was so quiet. Had the noise come from one of the other cells?  
No, she wasn’t so stupid as to believe that. Loki was having another nightmare.

Neither of them were strangers to nightmares, of course, and Johnny had enough of her own that she could hardly find fault or weakness in Loki for his. Usually she tried to ignore it, forcing herself not to listen to his quiet whimpers or the rare, half-formed word that escaped his sleeping mind. She would never dare to mention it to him, and trusted he would do the same for her. It was just one of their many unspoken agreements.

Yet the thought of letting him suffering any longer felt cruel. In their waking hours they had settled into the habit of soothing each others hurts; it felt like a betrayal to do nothing now, especially in light of everything she had admitted to herself lately. How could she love him and do nothing?  
  
But what could she do? With walls and barriers and empty corridors between them, there were limits to what comfort she could offer. She could not hold his hand, or stroke his hair, as her mother did for her when she was small and frightened and wary of sleep. She could not have kissed his cheek even if she _were_ able to be near to him, not with how she… it was not possible. The only other thing her mother had ever done to calm her to was to sing…

“I am not going to sing,” Johnny said out loud, lowering herself back to the floor. As if in reply, Loki’s small, frightened noises grew louder. “No, Loki.”  
She did wonder if perhaps she’d woken him, but she quickly dismissed the idea. Loki was too vain and proud to ever feign such weakness. Besides, she had seen him fake sleep before, she knew the signs. He was surprisingly bad at it. There was an unnatural stillness to him when he was only pretending, and he never got the sense of peace and calm quite right.

Loki was asleep, and there were no guards around… no one would hear her, if she did sing. And, though it would probably do no good to anyone, she would feel guilty if she did not even _try_. Even if it did nothing, she would be able to move on knowing she had at least tried.

“I don’t suppose you have any requests, Loki?” she asked quietly. “A favourite song? I confess I never had much talent for singing.”  
There was no answer except a frightened whine, muffled into his pillow. Whatever it was that lived in Loki’s mind, it terrified him.  
Now that she thought about it, Johnny wasn’t even sure if she knew any songs. After her mother… after her mother was gone, there was little time or space left in her life for music. She didn’t know for sure if she really remembered any of the songs she used to sing.  
A few, maybe? She hummed one of them, wincing at how cracked and thin her voice sounded. It was true she’d never had a particularly strong singing voice, but surely she used to be able to carry a tune? With an irritated sigh, she shook her head and cleared her throat, glancing across to be sure that she hadn’t woken Loki, and tried again.

It took her an embarrassing number of tries to be satisfied with her humming, but eventually she decided the tune sounded something like what she remembered.  
“You should know,” she whispered, so quietly that he would not have heard her even if he were awake, “I would do this for no one but you, my prince.”  
  
She struggled to remember the words to the song, but she forced herself to continue. It was short, only four lines, and the more she sang the more it came back to her, the quiet little story of the ghost offering his mother the rags she’d buried him in to take to the dance. She didn’t want to think it fitting, to sing of mothers and of dancing, when she had neither. She didn’t sing it because it was fitting, in any case, she sang it because she didn’t remember any other songs.

When she reached the last line, she fell silent, listening for any change. There was none; Loki still slept fitfully. But, Johnny reasoned, she had hardly sang very well now, had she? Really, she’d stumbled over almost every word, she couldn’t expect that to be soothing.  
She took a breath, and began again, stronger this time. She was lucky, really; the song worked rather well in her wavering voice, giving it a haunting, child-like quality that matched the tone. It almost didn’t matter that she couldn’t sing.

Maybe Loki would have even liked it, if he’d been awake to hear it.

She finished the last line once again, holding herself very still and silent as she listened. It seemed a strange hush had fallen on the cells, heavy and thick. She couldn’t hear any more crying.  
“Loki?” she whispered, fearful both of waking him and of breaking the silence that surrounded her. There was no answer. She peered across the hallway, searching for any of the telltale signs of wakefulness, and found none. Loki had settled, but he was still asleep.

Johnny smiled, and began the song again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the slight delay, but you can't say I didn't warn you! Still not 100% happy with this one, but that's probably just because writing it was like pulling teeth.
> 
> As always, comments are greatly appreciated, the story tumblr is at http://smallcriminals.tumblr.com/ , don't be shy.
> 
> The song that Johnny is singing is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4qECgRnV64  
> And thanks to Sha for helping me with that <3


	15. Good Opinions

The dungeons were filling up with restless barbarians, his mother visited often and with such worry in her eyes… Loki knew the signs of something coming. There was something stirring unrest in the realms. Perhaps he should warn someone, but quite honestly, he had little interest in that. No one wanted him to be part of that world, and so it was no longer his problem.

He felt absolutely certain Johnny would not feel the same way, which was why he wasn’t going to tell her. If she was the only person left who was not disgusted by him, he wouldn’t do anything to ruin her good opinion.  
“So crowded here, lately,” he remarked. Across the hall, Johnny rolled her eyes at him, making him grin. “I do miss when it was just me and you.”  
“Oh, I don’t know…” she sighed, stretching her arms above her head. “You’re quieter now.”  
Loki chuckled, tilting his head.  
“Have I told you lately how I adore your wit, dear?”  
“No. But if ever the impulse to do so takes you, I suggest you resist it.”  
“Sound advice.”  
“I’m known to give it,” she agreed lightly, her arms falling gracefully back to her side. Loki remembered suddenly that there had been a time when he wanted to peel away the skin on her arms, layer by layer, to find out where her freckles would stop. He looked away.  
“Your mother visits often,” Johnny said, startling him out of his thoughts and into a smile.  
“Yes,” he said, wondering if perhaps she, too, had noticed the signs of the coming Something.  
“Perhaps she misses you,” Johnny said quietly, and Loki realised that she had no idea the realms were in turmoil, and everything could change in an instant. He realised that Johnny was even less a part of the world than he was. All she had was three walls and a cage, a tattered tunic she picked apart for threads to tie her hair, and him.

How pathetic.

Loki sighed, sitting down against the wall by the front of his cell, mimicking Johnny’s posture by habit. She regarded him suspiciously, like she knew he was up to something, but that was well enough. He didn’t mind if she suspected him of mischief, even if all he intended was kindness. She knew him so well, after all.  
“Tell me about your mother,” he offered dispassionately, staring at his hands as if they were of interest, as if he had no interest in _her_. The mother that Johnny mourned so much. “What was she like?”  
“Brave,” Johnny said, wrapping her arms around herself. “And reckless. She was a warrior, that’s all.”  
“Was she not also your mother?”

He was not blind to what she was doing, distancing herself from a past she no longer wanted to live in. But Loki would like to think that he had grown, since his imprisonment. He might even like to think that he knew what denying the past would do to his friend, and how desperately he did not want it to.  
“She… was my mother.”  
Loki smiled, tapping his fingers against the energy field.  
“Then tell me of your _mother_ , Johnny.”

She gave him a glance that bluntly asked what exactly he believed he was doing, but Loki just smiled a soft, charming smile, and tilted his head to better listen. After a moment, she gave in, rubbing a hand against her face to hide what he assumed was a smile.  
“She used to sing to me,” she began. “When I could not sleep. And so of course I never wanted to sleep, for if I did, she would not sing to me.”

Loki found that it did pain him, a little, like an ache in his chest from running, not unbearable, but harsh in how tight and viciously present it was, to hear Johnny speak reverently of her mother. He was still not entirely sure he had no hand, no part in bringing about the death of the woman Johnny remembered so lovingly. And his own mother could only speak to him in secret, with magic and illusions, and he could rarely keep from raging at her like a child.  
But as she continued, her words flowed faster and easier, and she smiled and gestured with her hands, laughing brightly and painting a beautiful picture of a woman. A woman he would never meet, and yet still felt remarkably fond of with every word. And it soothed the pain. Not entirely, but it did.

“You would have liked her,” Johnny finished, after a long while of talking, her voice slightly hoarse. Loki smiled thinly and calmly wiped tears from the corners of his eyes, not caring, for once, if she saw. Why not let her see, after all? Of all the weaknesses she might have seen, this alone he might not be ashamed of.  
“Yes, I believe I would.”  
“She would have liked you,” she added, a moment later. Loki wasn’t quite sure what to say to that. “Though she would not have tolerated some of your past behaviour. Midgard, Loki? What were you thinking?”  
“I hardly remember,” he said, laughing softly. “Thank you, dear.”  
“For what?” Johnny asked curiously. He just smiled, bowing his head to her and standing, going back to his books. “Loki?”

He knew it would irritate her not to answer, and he was sorry for that, but there was little he could say that would not give away too much. She already knew him too well, and thought of him too kindly. It was probably better to stay silent and let her form a more accurate opinion of his nature. Better for her, at least. He could endure it.  
“Loki?”  
Loki looked up from his book and smiled at her.  
“For sharing something so personal. Thank you.”

Call him selfish, but he wanted her good opinion for a little while longer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one almost didn't go up, but we're good. Short chapter, but things are starting to actually happen? In this fic? I'm as shocked as you are.
> 
> As always the (barely fuctioning, currently, oops) tumblr is: smallcriminals.tumblr.com  
> Messages, comments, etc really do make me feel better about this fic, by the way. Just as a hint. (You should comment)


	16. Grief

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: not a happy chapter

“The queen… your mother… is dead.”

The guard spoke so bluntly that Johnny wished she had not stayed in her cell during the riot, that she had taken the opportunity to escape instead of hiding back in a corner and taking comfort in Loki’s amused glances. If she had her freedom, she could find some way to silence this man, to stop him from so callously hurting Loki.

Loki. He turned away, dismissing the guard with a nod, and Johnny struggled to her feet, desperate to make it harder for him to ignore her.  
“Loki…” He looked over his shoulder and shook his head, just slightly, his expression tight. She knew he was retreating back into his illusions, that likely right now he was raging and screaming and no one could see it or hear it. Without thinking, she tried to reach out, her hand catching on the energy wall.  
"You need not hide from me.”

A guard walked between their cells, kicking along a sword that had been left behind by the riot, and Loki - Loki’s illusion - smiled sadly.  
“It is not you I hide from.”  
Johnny lowered herself back to the floor again and pulled her knees up to her chest.  
“Now you know how I feel,” she said softly, knowing she could never offer comfort, only solidarity. Loki’s illusion nodded, but she could see the flickers of lost concentration around the edges, blurred and unnatural. “Don’t hide, Loki. And if you must hide, don’t lie.”  
He nodded again, all expression falling from him as he sat on the edge of the bed, head bowed. Quiet and still. A simple illusion to maintain, just a shield to keep his heart from showing.  
“Thank you,” he said, but the illusion’s mouth didn’t even move. Johnny smiled sadly, nodding.  
“Of course, dear,” she said, playing with the edge of her tunic. The silence weighed heavy on her, but she wouldn’t break it until he did.

“She never knew about you.” Loki’s voice was ragged, like he’d been screaming, rough and lost and sad. Johnny wanted for the third time in quick succession to be free of her cell, so she could find her way inside his illusions and hide there with him, holding his hands. “I was selfish, I never told her. I wanted you to myself, I thought… there would be time.”  
“I know.”  
“She would have adored you.”  
“I know,” Johnny repeated, hoping he would understand her true meaning: that she _knew_ , she understood, and he didn’t have to explain. She’d known all along that one day, one day Loki would have smirked and bowed and said, all boyish innocence, ‘oh yes, mother, have you met my dearest Johnny?’.

“Are you hurt?” she asked, worried that Loki had done something stupid in his grief, hidden behind a shroud so she could not see.  
“Yes.”  
“Will it heal?”  
“The cut shall heal.”  
Johnny twisted the ends of her hair around her fingers nervously. Talking to him when she could not see him was difficult enough, but knowing he was hurt and not knowing how...  
“It’s nothing,” Loki reassured her quietly, a little tenderness in his tone. “A scratch, my dear, I am… I shall survive it.”  
“I am impossibly glad of it,” she admitted, voice cracking. Then she shook her head, swallowing down the tears and forcing herself to be strong. For him, she could be strong one more time. “Tell me about her?”  
“No,” Loki said. “No.”  
“Then I will… tell you this,” Johnny began, taking in a long breath. A story she had never shared before. It would not be the first time she’d told him her secrets. “When I was but a servant girl, I fell, one day in the courtyard, and hurt my knees quite badly. The blood stained the parts of my dress that were not torn, and I cried, though I suppose I was not so badly hurt - I was quite scared, you know.”  
“I would imagine so.”  
“Yes. But no one helped me, until a woman came past and stopped, bending down to wipe away my tears with the hem of her dress. I remember knowing she was important, because the dress, it was so soft.” She smiled at the memory, aware her throat was choked and tight, her story steeped in tears. “She walked with me to the healing rooms and left me there to be cared for, and one of the healers, she told me that the woman… was the queen. It… confused me, but I thought little of it. It was only a small thing, to take a child to the healing rooms, and so I thought…”

She paused, composing herself, glancing over at the other cell. Loki’s illusion had not moved or looked up, yet she could feel eyes watching her, so she smiled for his sake.  
“The dress I was wearing that day, it was one my mother had given me. I was very sad to lose it. The healers gave me a new one and sent me on my way, but it did upset me so. And then… two days later, I received a package in my room. It was my dress, with a note, a handwritten note, saying…” Johnny wiped tears from her face with both hands. “Saying that she had seen how sadly I looked at the dress when it was taken away, and so she had repaired it for me. Herself.”  
“She loved to sew,” Loki choked out. “She loved to. It would not have burdened her to sew one small girl’s dress.”  
“I know.” Johnny smiled, letting the tears fall. Why not? He had cried over her mother. “But it was kind of her.”  
“My mother was very kind.”  
“Yes.”  
“Did you… see her again, after that?” He asked, voice wavering. Johnny shook her head.  
“Only from a distance. I doubt she remembered me at all, it likely meant nothing to her. But… when I was sentenced, when I was… she was there, then. She looked so sad, I almost apologised.”  
“She… would not have wished you to.”

Johnny looked over at the other cell, wiping her face clean with the back of her hands, surprised when Loki’s illusion - Loki - lifted his head to smile at her.  
“She was your mother.”  
“She was.”  
“I am so sorry, Loki.”  
“Now I know how you feel,” he said calmly, his eyes sad. “Now I understand why you’re here.”  
“I know, Loki.” Johnny sighed, forcing a sad smile. “I wish that you did not have to.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I miss Frigga. I sorely want to write a spin off from that day that Johnny got hurt... but I have too many things to write.
> 
> As always, tumblr is at http://smallcriminals.tumblr.com/ , feel free to drop by. (This week I even have a tiny bit up there that I cut out of this chapter, if you want some insight into what I lose). Comments of any kind are well loved. See you next week when this fic will temporarily have more than two characters!


	17. At Any Cost

“Enough illusions, brother,” Thor said and, sitting against the back wall and hidden, Loki flinched. His illusion - intact, uninjured, still neat and smiling - might be talking to Thor, but Loki’s true focus was on Johnny, sitting in her cell and pretending not to be interested in the conversation, her face half covered by her unbound hair.  
He didn’t want her to see him like this. If he had known this would happen, he would have at least tidied _himself_ up, if not picked up the furniture he had so carelessly destroyed. Thor didn’t matter, Thor was nothing to him anymore, but _Johnny_ , Johnny couldn’t see. He stalled for a moment, staring across at her, wishing he could find some way to silently beg her to _look away_.

Instead it almost felt like she was meeting his eyes.

But Thor was not going to be patient forever. That oaf probably assumed every second of hesitation was just to spite him, and it would be better not to antagonise him _too_ much, so Loki gave in and let the lies fall. He plastered on a bitter smirk and hid all his quiet panic behind the messy fall of his hair, because Johnny had been teaching him something after all.  
“Now you see me,” he said, looking past his false brother, finding that the look on Johnny’s face was too kind, too gentle to be anything but sweet agony in his chest. He almost found himself wishing Thor had expressed any kind of emotion at all, just so he could say out loud to stop _looking_ at him like that.

Trading barbs with Thor was too easy, even after all this time, but underneath Loki’s mind was reeling. He was being offered a chance to avenge his mother, his _mother_ \- what would Johnny say, if he could speak to her now? What would she tell him to do? Risking a glance across at her, Loki realised he knew the answer to that all too well.  
Johnny would do anything to avenge a mother that didn’t deserve to die. Loki barely heard the rest of Thor’s argument, just smiled and asked when this ill-advised plan could begin. If Thor noticed anything was wrong, he didn’t let it show. Not so long ago, Loki would have assumed that meant Thor simply hadn’t noticed, but now he was not so sure. Recent events had left his false brother wiser, more cautious than before.  
He would have to be careful.

“But you might give me a moment?” he said, gesturing to his disheveled appearance. “A little privacy, Thor, really.”  
“If you try to escape-”  
“Thor, we’re in the _dungeons_.” Loki pointed out, hauling himself to his feet with an exaggerated wince at the cut on one heel. “Where could I _go_?”

Thor grunted a warning and stomped away, leaving Loki to attempt to straighten his shirt and offer Johnny a thin smile.  
“Must you watch me so?” he asked after a moment of futilely fussing with his appearance.  
“I had become so accustomed to the illusion,” she said, by way of explanation. “I had forgotten how pale…” She stopped talking. Ah, yes, for some time now Loki had been hiding away all the little imperfections of dungeon life: the pale, lifeless tint to his skin, the darkness beneath his eyes, how long and out of control his hair had become… he sighed gruffly, pulling at a few overly curly strands with a frown, and was startled when Johnny actually _laughed_ , soft and sweet.  
“That looks nice,” she said, echoing his own words back at him. “Your hair looks nice like that.”  
“My hair looks appalling,” Loki sighed, testing how much weight he could put on his foot before it hurt. The cut was very nearly healed, but he’d rather not waste magic on it if he didn’t have to.  
“I like it,” Johnny said, smiling faintly. “Don’t change it too much, when you hide again.”  
“Don’t be absurd,” Loki snapped back, healing up his foot anyway just in case - and because it wouldn’t do to hobble in front of his false-brother. Loki did have _some_ pride left, after all.  
“When am I ever not absurd?”  
Loki smiled to himself.  
“Never,” he agreed, stepping out of the cell for the first time in at least a year, letting his magic curl around himself to fix his clothing, hide the flaws: the pallor of his skin, the redness around his eyes. His hair… he left the hair mostly the same. Just neater. Johnny pushed herself to her feet with an inelegant wobble, grinning at him through the front of her cell. “There, how do I look?”  
“Perfect,” she told him, placing a hand against the energy wall. “Quite perfect, my dear.”  
“Utterly absurd,” Loki murmured fondly, resting his hand over hers, only the thin wall of magical energy between them. Closer than they had ever been, and still too far. “Thank you, dearest.”

“Be careful.” Johnny’s voice was thin and nervous, her fingers curling like she wished she could clasp their hands together and force him to stay. Maybe he’d misjudged, or maybe he should have demanded her freedom, too; but how could he do that without showing how much he cared? No one could ever know how much he cared, or Johnny would be... He pushed that thought away and smiled at her, making sure to be charming, to be light and cheerful, even knowing he would not fool her.  
“Of course I shall be,” he promised smoothly. “You’ll see me again.”  
“I should expect so,” Johnny said, her hand dropping to wrap around her waist. Now he could stand over her like this, she seemed so small. “Revenge does terrible things to us,” she added. It sounded not quite like a warning.  
“Is it not worth it?” Doubts crept in again, and Loki realised he did not want to do anything that would make her ashamed of him. If she had changed her mind about revenge, if she didn’t think it was worth it… he didn’t know what he would do.  
“It is. But be careful, Loki.”  
“Johnny…” He smiled down at her again, tilting his hand against the energy wall like he could touch her face behind it. “Dear, sweet, pretty Johnny. How can you doubt my return, when you are all I have?”  
Johnny blushed, and Loki wanted to make that awkward, pink-cheeked smile his only goal for the rest of his life.  
“You should go. Your brother is waiting.”  
“He’s not my brother.”  
“Thor is waiting.”  
“Yes, yes. Don’t miss me too much, will you?”  
“Loki,” Johnny smirked, though the blush still staining her cheeks gave her away. “I shall not even notice you are gone.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh hi Thor! You were in this for like two paragraphs, good for you!
> 
> So, looks like certain situations are coming to an end... but not this fic. Don't worry, we've still got plenty of chapters to go! However, since this is a logical point for a pause, I won't be posting a chapter next week - since NaNo is coming up, I need to make sure I get the next few chapters cleaned up and ready to post, so I'm going to dedicate next week to that, instead of worrying about posting. Uh, not to mention that it's my birthday that weekend so I'd giving myself a day off.
> 
> So see you in two weeks time! Hopefully, like Johnny, you won't even know I'm gone.
> 
> (I'm also going to be trying to sort out the tumblr (http://smallcriminals.tumblr.com/), which will hopefully have plenty of updates during my hiatus, so if you have comments to make, questions to ask (either me or the characters - they love questions!) or demands to make, now is the time. There'll be an important post going up soon concerning bonus content.)


	18. Finally

Despite her words, of course the days dragged on without Loki there to talk to. Even the guards seemed to sense the air of barely contained panic and misery that filled her cage and choked her every second that Loki was gone. They left her alone.  
She wondered if anyone would tell her if he was dead. Would a guard come up to her cell and look through the wall blankly at her, tell her ‘Loki is dead’, as if that were all that could be said? Or would she hear it in rumours, as she had the first time, impersonal whispers of the death of a monster, people laughing at the thought?  
Or would she never know, and always wonder?

She was asleep when the guards came and dragged her from her cell, confused and stumbling through the corridors. She was half awake by the time a nervous, frightened servant girl timidly offered her food and clean clothes, and asked if she wanted to bathe or if she’d rather sleep. When Johnny asked the girl what was going on, she was told this was by order of the king.  
That was when she worked out what was happening.

She turned down the bath but accepted the clothes. The dress was _green_ , which only further convinced her that she was the only person who paid attention. After bidding the girl to leave the food within easy reach of the bed, Johnny sat on the mattress, uncomfortably soft after the floor of her cell, and waited.

It seemed like hours later that the door to the outer rooms creaked open, and she heard a sickeningly familiar voice rumble a dismissal to the guards, and had to remind herself not to reach for the knife on her food plate. Heavy footfalls sounded, and then Odin was standing in the doorway to the bedroom, looking at her.  
Johnny took a deep breath, picked up a pillow, and threw it at him.  
“Now who is being absurd?” she demanded, glaring as Loki caught the pillow, his irritatingly convincing illusion of the king faded away as he grinned at her so brightly and fondly.  
“Truthfully, dearest, did you miss me?”  
The forced cheer in his voice, the uncertain crook of his smile, and the wary, guarded look in his eyes caught her heart and squeezed it. He really didn’t know?  
“Loki,” she choked out without meaning to, stumbling to uneasy feet. Loki crossed the room quickly and pulled her into his arms in a way that should not have been effortless, not the first time they ever touched. Johnny let herself be cradled against his chest to hide her sobs and it did not feel at all unnatural to do so. “Loki.”  
“Hush, dearest…” he whispered, patting her back with all the gentleness of a man who knows he is not good at comforting, and that alone made her want to cry again. Instead she smiled, pulling back to lift a hand to his face. She needed the reassurance more than she needed to keep her distance. Loki blinked, taken aback by her forward gesture, and Johnny smiled so hard her face hurt.  
“I always imagined your skin would be cold,” she joked, shakily stepping away, keeping a grip on his arms to steady herself. “Loki, what have you done?”  
“Taken my revenge,” he said, and then paused, something soft and sad hiding at the edges of his eyes. “And yours.”  
“Loki…”

The grin he forced onto his face was so fake she did not believe for a second that _anyone_ would believe it, let alone her.  
“As far as Asgard is concerned,” he explained brightly, making her cringe with his easy tone, “the king has come to a… realisation, about the nature of grief. He understands now, why you, a poor, innocent, _grieving_ child, might be driven to terrible things.” Loki’s tone shifted to something mocking, and Johnny backed away, sitting back down on the bed. She’d never been afraid of him before, and yet suddenly, she was beginning to feel so. His eyes narrowed, and he looked away, muttering darkly to himself. “Not to mention he has _finally_ heard of your brutal treatment, and believes that no one, no matter their crime, is deserving of such cruelty…”

Loki turned around again and saw her, and Johnny knew by the way his face fell that her own was doing a poor job of concealing her emotions. When he spoke again, it was soft and awkward.  
“No one could argue, dear Johnny, that you are not deserving of some compassion. Imprisonment, certainly, but… here, where you might be comfortable.” His gesture encompassed the rooms, and despite everything, Johnny felt a smile creep back onto her face. Heavy-handed and dangerous Loki’s meddling might be, but his kindness was, at least, unmistakable. “It’s all that I can do, I’m sorry.”  
“It’s more than I had ever any hope for,” she pointed out, holding out her hands to him. It was, perhaps, not the surprise it should have been when he took them almost greedily. His fingers brushed curiously over her own, mapping the shape of her hands, as if he had thought about doing so a thousand times. Maybe he had. She stood, so that he need not bend so awkwardly over her bed, and smiled as best she could. “Odin is dead?”  
“I rule in his place,” Loki said, avoiding the question. Avoiding the blame. She nodded anyway, bowing her head politely.  
“Thank you, my king,” she said, meaning it as a tease, surprised when he shook his head and let go of one hand to take her chin, gently guiding her to look him in the eyes.  
“I am not your king, Johnny. I am Asgard’s, but never yours. Understand?”

No. She didn’t understand. But he seemed so sure, so desperate, that she nodded again. Loki seemed to sense her confusion, smiling sadly.  
“To one person, I beg you, allow me to still be Loki,” he explained softly.  
“Loki,” she repeated, reaching up with her freed hand to brush a strand of hair from his face, tucking it behind his ear. He’d kept it long, she noticed, and just a little curly, just as she’d said she liked it. “Very well then, my dear.”  
“Dear Johnny,” Loki said warmly. If Johnny could claim a simple reason to love him, she would claim this smile, the childish one.  
And then, of course, it was gone, and he was letting go of her and stepping away, hands folded behind his back formally.  
“I have something to ask of you,” he said. “But first, have you eaten?” He glanced at the full plate of food on the table nearby and frowned. “I see not.”  
“I was not hungry,” Johnny lied, leaning against the bedpost for a second to steel herself to walk over to the table. “Will you join me?”

Loki bowed gracefully, grinned, and offered her his arm.  
“I’ll get you a cane to help you walk, dear,” he offered, and she nodded, leaning on him as they walked to the table together, taking the chance to feel the lean strength in his arm and the rich leather smell of his armour. He pulled her chair out for her and sat down across from her, breaking open a loaf of bread with an appreciative smile. “I missed good food, didn’t you?”  
“More than I realised,” she admitted, taking half the bread from him and biting into it without hesitation, her eyes falling closed. “I love bread.”  
“So I see,” Loki laughed, leaning across the table to wipe crumbs from her chin. “You need not rush. No one will take it from you.”  
“I am eating with _you_ , Loki, I hardly think I’m safe,” she pointed out, grabbing an apple and bringing it up to her nose to breathe in the crisp, light smell. “How much I have missed…”  
“Wait until you see the sun again,” he said gently. Johnny looked across at the darkness outside the windows and smiled. “It’s beautiful. So much more beautiful than I remembered.”

Johnny looked down at her pale hands.  
“I think I shall burn as soon as it touches me,” she mused, and then giggled quietly. “But my freckles will darken again, at least…” she added, pulling up the sleeve of her dress to frown at how faded her many freckles had become. Across the table, Loki nearly choked on a mouthful of wine.  
“They get darker?” he asked, messily wiping spilt wine from his chin. Johnny tutted, leaning over to clean it off with the edge of her sleeve, deliberately ignoring the edge of her thumb grazing his lower lip. Yes, she certainly didn’t notice how warm and soft his skin was.  
“That _is_ how freckles work, Loki. Did you not know?” she teased.  
“I’ve never known anyone so densely freckled as you are,” he countered. “It’s very distracting, you know.”  
“I apologise if my skin distracts you, Loki.”  
“As you should. Would you like some of this pie? It’s really quite good.”  
“What did you want to ask me?” she asked calmly, ignoring the fact that he was avoiding the subject. Loki sighed, putting down his glass.  
“Help me?” he asked quietly, looking at her intently over the table. “I… I am aware that I have made mistakes. That I am not always a good king. But I _want_ to be. This is not blind ambition, Johnny, I wish to rule well, and fairly. Won’t you help me? Advise me, temper my rage. Keep me from making the mistakes I made before I met you.” He reached a hand across the table nervously. Without thinking, Johnny placed both of her hands over his.

“I trust you,” he told her, grasping at her hands tightly. “You won’t allow the worst of me to overcome my good intentions.”  
“No one will ever know, will they?” she asked. He looked down, his jaw tightening.  
“How can they?”  
“You would have me advise you in secret, then?”  
“If you’re willing?” She’d never seen his green eyes so pleading, the nervous downturn to his mouth so sweet she wanted to taste it - she couldn’t, of course. But she _wanted_ to. She pulled her hands away to stop from pulling him closer, flinching slightly at the look of hurt on his face as she hid behind her glass of wine.  
“I see.”  
“I expect you to listen to me,” she said idly, as if her heart wasn’t pounding in her chest. Loki’s face lit up, and then he caught himself and moderated his expression to something more subdued. “Especially when I tell you not to do something stupid.”  
“I make absolutely no promises,” Loki said, picking at his food. It seemed he was helpless to resist his pleased smile, judging by the way it kept returning no matter how many times he composed himself. “But I shall at least _consider_ listening to you.”  
“I shall not hesitate to throw another pillow at you,” she warned, a little startled when he laughed. She’d never heard his laugh up close before, and it was such a quiet, startled, pretty thing that it had always been too muffled to appreciate. It had always been lovely, of course. But now it was more so.

“I do understand, Loki,” she said quietly, once his laughter had faded. “All the damage you have done… you want to do what is right now. To make things right.”  
“I have only ever wished to make things right,” he corrected gently, reaching over to brush his fingers against her cheek. “But I’m not certain I knew what right _was_. I cannot do this alone. I need you.”  
“I have one condition,” Johnny said, trying not to smirk. By the gleam in his eyes she knew she’d failed. “The magic lessons. I want to keep learning.”  
Loki scoffed.  
“As if I would allow your talent to go untaught.” He smiled, leaning closer to bury his hand in her hair, his eyes blinking closed for a fraction of a second. “Very well. I accept your terms.” He smirked, sitting back. “Term. Trusted advisor to the king. It suits you.”

Johnny shook her head. No, it didn’t suit her. She hated the king, she always had.  
“Not to the king,” she said. “I serve no kings. But… advisor to Loki, liar and fool that he is, who needs me...” She smiled. “Yes, I think that suits me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you miss me?
> 
> As always, the tumblr is at http://smallcriminals.tumblr.com/ - please do drop by and let me know what you think of stuff/ask me questions/tell Loki he's awful/whatever.
> 
> On that note: while there's plenty of this story to go yet, when it does end there will be a gap before I start posting the sequel (since I... haven't written it yet...), and during that time I hope to post a series of little one-shot inserts: scenes from the pther character's perspective, a few scenes from the past referenced in some chapters, maybe some side stuff with other characters who I just really want to write more of... so if you have a suggestion or an idea of something you'd like to see, please let me know, either here or at the tumblr :3 I can't promise I'll write them all but more ideas never hurts.
> 
> Anyway... hope this chapter was satisfying. Things are going to be changing around here, hmmm....


	19. All things coming together

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is another of those chapters with mild sexual content, though it is still very mild.

He and Johnny settled quickly into a routine, though truthfully it was merely an extension of their old routine, only _closer_. Every night he would cloak himself in magic so none could see him sneak into her rooms, and they would talk and argue and steal food from each others hands. Sometimes they touched, fingertips brushing faces or shoulders, just for the novelty.  
Johnny was an excellent advisor. She insulted and belittled his bad ideas with relish, and helped him hone his good ideas into cunning plans. She might have little patience for the finer points of politics, but her compassion far surpassed his own, and the ferocity with which she defended Asgard's people kept his petty hatreds in check. In that, they were an excellent match.

Although he did wish she would stop shouting at him, sometimes.  
“Would you please at least _attempt_ to be serious in your duties. Loki, if must you insist on being king, then you should _behave_ like a king!”  
“I _do_ behave like a king,” he grumbled, the piece of apple he’d been about to eat hanging forgotten from his fingers just seconds from his mouth. “I rather thought the point of you was that I need _not_ behave before you.”  
“I was not talking about when you are before me, I…” Johnny began, and then trailed off, staring. Loki had no idea what she could possibly be looking at, raising one eyebrow, and Johnny coughed awkwardly, blushing. Interesting… what had gotten into her mind just then? “I refer to your complete disinterest in the needs of the people, Loki.”  
“Again, I did think that was the point of _you_ ,” he pointed out. Surely she must have realised that by now? “If I am uninterested in such distracting sentiment, at least I have you to-” _distract me_ \- “care on my behalf,” he finished, swallowing down that strange almost-slip of the tongue. “And an admirable job you do of it.”  
“You _must_ be aware you are doing that,” Johnny said abruptly. Loki blinked, confused.  
“Doing what?”  
“ _That_ ,” Johnny huffed, batting his hand away from his face. Ah, yes, the apple. He’d entirely forgotten about it, actually.  
“Just waiting for you to be done asking me foolish questions,” he lied, bringing the apple back up to his mouth and chewing it slowly.

Johnny was staring again. Loki swallowed his bite of apple, frowning at her curiously.  
“What?” he repeated. She made a frustrated sound in the back of her throat and snatched the remaining piece of apple from his hand, tossing it down on the plate beside them. And then she leaned closer and tangled a hand in his hair and _kissed_ him, which was alarming to be sure, but Loki had never been one to turn down such a _glorious_ favour.  
Or back down from a challenge, come to think of it.

Johnny tasted of the apple they’d been sharing, tart and crisp, which begged exploring and so he did, curling a hand to the back of her neck and pulling her closer, pressing his tongue eagerly past the softness of her lips, teasing against her teeth _entirely_ for the sound she made, low and irritated, her hand in his hair fisting and forcing him closer, deeper, _harder_ ; and things, certain things, small compulsions and needs and _wants_ and strange, fractured dreams all suddenly made sense at once, the truth as easy as a bruising, slick-mouthed kiss.

He was in love with Johnny, wasn’t he? This frustrating, lovely, impossible woman - who was currently insistent on crawling into his lap, which was honestly rather nice - and he was in love with her.  
“Johnny.” It was almost _painful_ to pull away from her, cradling her face in his hands like a precious thing, the most precious thing, but Loki’s weapons were words, above all else. “Johnny, I-”  
“I know, it’s impossible, there is not-” Johnny silenced him with her sharp tone, her face flushed so beautifully, her freckles a starfield. “Be kind to me when you deny me, Loki, only please, let me have this a little longer?” Her fingers slipped through his hair gently, like it was the softest thing she’d ever touched. “You lie so well, so, will you not pretend?”  
“I can’t,” he whispered, letting his fingers drag ever so slightly across her cheeks, memorising soft skin he’d only dared to brush against before. “I cannot pretend.”  
“Why _not?”_ Johnny demanded, her voice cracking. Loki smiled, drawing her closer to press a kiss to the corner of her lips.  
“I cannot _pretend_ , Johnny,” he repeated softly, smirking when her eyes widened.  
“Oh.”  
“It was really a shock to me, too.”  
Johnny huffed out a sigh, tugging on his hair.  
“Do shut up and kiss me again?”  
“It seemed more as if you were kissing me,” he pointed out, more than content to simply sit there, Johnny perched awkwardly in his lap as he stroked the curves of her face. Johnny tugged on his hair again and really, he had to encourage that sort of thing, grinning playfully. “I’ve no complaints.”  
“Loki!”  
“If you insist…”

The second time was softer, sweeter, Johnny no longer so desperately trying to savour every moment, and that was _worse_ , somehow, because Loki could _feel_ it. Feel that this was not the hurried, messy kiss of a night’s conquest; this was deep and indescribably warm, slow and _deliberate_ , and Johnny pushed back against every tease, never pliant or yielding, wilful in this as in everything - which should feel strange, should feel counter to Loki’s nature, his _right_ as _king_ , but it felt as natural as breathing, as natural as fitting an arm around her waist to hold her closer and settle her better across his legs, his other hand finding its way back to the graceful curve of her neck.  
“Johnny,” he gasped out between little stolen kisses. She groaned irritably, narrowing her eyes. “A moment, dear?”  
“ _Must_ you keep stopping?” she hissed. Loki laughed, kissing her again in apology.  
“I really must ask you something,” he said, when he finally managed to untangle himself once more. “Vitally important.”  
“ _What?_ ”  
Loki took a moment to breathe, closing his eyes to try and regain some tiny measure of control. The moment he opened them again and saw her darkened lips the effort was wasted.  
“Can I carry you to your bed and ravish you?” he blurted out, voice far too shaky, and then laughed awkwardly at what had to be the least eloquent seduction of his life. After a small, stunned second, Johnny laughed too, dragging her thumb against his over-sensitive lips.  
“What if I do not want to be ravished?”  
“Love you, then, only please, _something._ ” Loki was not _used_ to not having the power in this situation; never before had he ever feared a woman might say ‘no’, but Johnny very well might - she _could_ , and he would heed her. Of course, he would heed any woman who did so, but Johnny, Johnny was the first who he believed would, and the first who he desperately wanted not to.  
“Do you?” Johnny asked, surprisingly softly, her face suddenly quite quiet and serious. “Love me?”  
“I…” The pretty half-lie, the playful deflection of the question was poised on his tongue, perfectly formed to cause no offense and make her smile and laugh at his charms. “Yes,” he said instead, a little helplessly.

Johnny smiled, that perfect, bashful, sweet smile he had not seen since he left her in the dungeons, her cheeks stained with a shy blush and her eyes downcast and bright; the smile he’d vowed to make his goal in life, without even realising he’d done so, or what that _meant_ , and he was right, he _was_ a fool.  
“My dearest Johnny,” he murmured, giving in to the urge to nuzzle against the side of her face, chasing the heat of her blush. “My dearest love.”  
“Loki,” Johnny said back, full of tenderness, which really amounted to the same thing. “Do I have to choose?”  
“Hmm?” Loki only barely registered her nonsensical question, far too interested in the gentle curve of her jaw, the one he had once thought too round, and now found to be quite the perfect place to press his mouth against greedily.  
“Between being ravished and being loved,” Johnny explained, toying with a strand of his hair. Loki really thought that keeping it as she liked it was one of his better ideas. “Might I have both?”  
Loki smirked, leaning down into the slope of Johnny’s neck and finding a place to _bite_.  
“Whatever pleases you, dearest,” he purred sweetly. “Just let me please you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I admit, I'm nervous about this one. My cute, oblivious idiots finally worked it out though, it would seem. Things can only improve for them from here on out... right?
> 
> As always, story tumblr is at http://smallcriminals.tumblr.com/ , though I haven't been posting much lately... but I check it fairly often so don't be shy about questions! And I'm still looking for ideas for one-shot stories to write and post while I'm working on the sequel - check last chapter's author note for details.


	20. Wants and Needs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The disclaimer at the top of last chapter basically applies constantly from now on. These two can't keep hands to themselves.

Being trapped with in the dungeons with only Loki for company for so long, Johnny foolishly imagined she knew everything about him, yet it seemed every day she learned something new. His hands were warm and soft, he liked to brush her hair, his sly grasp of politics was even greater than she’d imagined...  
He seemed to crave every kind or gentle touch with a desperate intensity. No matter how that saddened her, Johnny tried not to let it show.

They still spoke, every night, of politics and the hardships of ruling, and the state of the realms and the people; but where before they had sat in separate chairs, or at least a respectful distance apart, now they inevitably ended up curled together, Johnny settled easily (after some practice to accommodate her legs) in Loki’s lap, her back cradled against his chest.  
Johnny had become an expert in keeping the conversation on important political matters, even when she could feel every word Loki spoke as a soft rumble in his chest, though by the end of the night it was not uncommon for Loki to have crept a hand beneath her skirt, drawing circles on her skin.

Johnny still was not sure how she felt about that: Loki touching her legs, brushing his fingers tenderly over the places where bone sat badly, pressing the ball of his hand against sore knots in her muscles. She felt like she should be ashamed, though she knew there was nothing for her to ashamed of; or perhaps she simply felt as if he should be more wary, more cautious of her than this. Like he should think she was weak and fragile.

But he did not treat her like a fragile thing; instead he gave her a cane so she might walk by herself, and he crowded her into corners and against walls for stolen kisses, and in the night he hooked one leg over hers to draw himself closer with no concern for her injuries. No, that was hardly fair, for he was _aware_ of her injuries. Careful of them, even.  
But he did not let them stop him. He urged her legs up around his waist and over his shoulders and never seemed to notice the scars unless he was kissing them better. And it was… freeing, in a way, because Johnny finally felt as if she had permission not to care.

But Loki was, above all else, a liar, even with his actions, and she had to _know_.

“Does it bother you?” she asked faintly, glancing down at Loki’s long fingers, idly drawing what she thought might be runes on the skin of her thigh. Just to the left of his hand was an ugly bump where a piece of bone had settled too close to the surface, and at her words he reached over to brush against it, quiet confirmation that he knew exactly what she was asking. “I know it is not… pretty.”  
“Put it from your mind,” Loki told her, voice low and suggestive as he attempted to distract her with a kiss, but Johnny turned her head away, sighing softly. “Dearest…”  
“I cannot,” she admitted quietly. “I have to know, Loki.”  
She felt Loki sigh against the side of her neck, just before she felt him nuzzle close in quiet defeat.  
“Why can I not deny you?” He huffed, making her smile despite the conversation. “The first time I saw, I felt… _angry_. That you had been so injured, it incensed me.”  
“And now?”  
“Now I have found those responsible and had them punished,” he said easily, kissing the underside of her jaw. Johnny sucked in a slow breath. She had wondered about that. Part of her had known that Loki would not stand to let the guards that had hurt her go unpunished, and part of her was glad. But it still troubled her, all the power he now had, to punish anyone who angered him. “Does that displease you?”  
“I… do not know,” she decided, tilting her head to lead her cheek against the top of his head gently, feeling him smile against her neck at the gesture. “It troubles me, more than displeases me.”  
“Why?”  
“Loki…” Johnny smiled wryly. “We are talking about how _you_ feel.”  
“Are we? It sounds to me as if we are talking about how _you_ feel, dearest, and I’m glad to, truly, if that is what you wish…”  
“Loki.”

He sighed softly, curling his body more fully around hers.  
“I confess I know not what you wish me to say, my love,” he muttered, frustration colouring his words. “Your injuries pain me as if they were my own, yet I will not…” his voice softened, his fingers grazing her knee. “I cannot let them come between us. Nothing between us, my Johnny. Never again.”  
She smiled, catching hold of his hand and lacing their fingers together tightly.  
“Indeed not,” she agreed. But now that she had begun on the subject of her legs, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. “I used to dance, you know.”  
“But you were such a clumsy child,” Loki teased, nudging the collar of her dress aside to nibble lazily at her shoulder. Johnny laughed softly, squeezing his hand in warning. “Oh, very well. Do continue, I’m listening.”  
“I liked to dance,” she repeated, not sure what else to say. “Might I ask you something?”  
“You must know you can ask anything.”  
“But I cannot ask Loki,” she explained softly. He tensed, lifting his head to look at her. “I have to ask the king.”  
“I am not your king.” There was a coldness in his voice that almost frightened her.  
“But only the king could grant permission for a prisoner to go to the healing rooms.”  
Loki calmed a little, pressing his cheek lightly against the side of her face, his eyelashes tickling her cheekbone as his eyes drifted closed.  
“Of course you can go. Of course, you must. But they-”  
“Will not be able to heal the damage, I know,” she sighed, turning her head to bump their noses together gently, bringing a hand up to touch his face. “Yet they may yet do some good for me.”  
“Then go. The king will permit it.” He smiled faintly, tilting his chin just enough to brush a kiss against her mouth. “Dance with me?”  
“What?” Johnny asked, blinking in confusion. Loki grinned, instantly a flurry of movement, standing from the seat and sweeping her with him. She squeaked, digging her hands into his shoulders, but she need not have worried, Loki’s arms wrapping tightly around her waist, lifting her up so her feet barely brushed the floor and swinging her easily. “Loki!”  
“What?” He was a breath away from laughing, she could see it in the sparkle of his eyes and the bright curve of his smile, and it was beautiful, so beautiful that she just shook her head and kissed him, hard. Loki grinned against her mouth, humming his encouragement as she pushed her tongue past his lips to get at the taste of frost and magic that lived in his mouth, for once passively accepting her demanding behaviour with something that felt strangely like eager submission.  
“I do so love when you do that,” he rasped when she pulled away, his pleased chuckle a little unsteady and his green eyes a little glazed. “You’re so _forceful_.”  
“I love you,” Johnny said gently, prying her hands from his shoulders to frame his face. Loki was startled into a sweet smile, his arms tightening around her waist, and Johnny realised this was the first time she had said it. “Loki, I love you.”  
“My dearest love.”

He set her down on the ground lightly, but Johnny was not unaware of the mischief in his eyes, and so she was not surprised when he hooked both hands under her thighs and urged her legs up around his waist, so that he could hold her up with only one arm to support her, burying the other hand in her hair and drawing her in for a kiss. To test a theory, Johnny pushed forcefully into the kiss. Loki groaned happily, his fingers catching on her braid and tugging it free.  
“I hadn’t noticed how much you like that,” she said breathlessly, pulling back for air. Loki tilted his head in a vague shrugging gesture, smiling.  
“Neither had I, but oh, I really do. Feel free to do it often.”  
“Kiss you?” Johnny asked lightly, brushing a strand of hair behind his ear.  
“ _Own_ me,” Loki replied, dark and intense. Then he puffed out a quiet breath, looking away like he was half shocked the words had left his mouth. Johnny, a little shocked herself, could not blame him. “That is-”  
“You want that?” she asked, frowning slightly. Loki had always seemed such a proud, dominating man. It would feel wrong to try and assert her will over his… except… wasn’t that what she had been doing all along? Refusing to rise to his taunts, calmly matching his wit, even insisting and demanding things of him, regardless of whether it was her place.  
“I want…” Loki shook his head, clearly trying to clear it. “I _wanted_ to own _you_ , but now I - you are so strong, so defiant, I _crave_ it. I want you. This is who you are.”  
“Then it is a good thing you are not my king,” she pointed out, startling a laugh out of him. “My Loki. Tell me what you want?”  
“ _You_ ,” he insisted, hissing happily when she experimentally tugged on his hair to pull his head back, nipping at his throat; something she had wished to do for so long, since watching him in the dungeons with his head tipped lazily back against the wall. “That’s a good start.”  
“Bed,” Johnny said distractedly, giving in to the urge to explore the long, elegant line of his neck. Loki hummed, distracted, and she smiled to herself. “Loki. I wasn’t asking.”  
“Yes _, milady.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a little spacey right now but let's see...
> 
> Yes, I'm doing NaNoWriMo next month but I have all the chapters sorted out already, so there should be no disruption, unless I have a mental breakdown (which is possible).   
> Tumblr is still at: http://smallcriminals.tumblr.com/ so feel free to drop by, though it'll be even less active than usual. For the record, my person tumblr is: http://girlcalledbob.tumblr.com/ but, while I check it frequently, I don't blog much these days.
> 
> If you have any requests for extra scenes for the intermission fic, still taking those. See you next week!


	21. How Long

For the first time in a long time, Loki was at peace.

He remembered, so long ago now, screaming at his broth - at Thor - at his _brother_ \- that he had never wanted to be king, and that was as true now as it had been then. He understood how well suited, and how poorly suited, he was to the task, but this was his responsibility now, to Asgard and her people, and he was aware of that. Odin could not rule; Loki refused to believe that old fool had been capable, at the end. And Thor _would_ not rule, though Loki was perhaps willing to admit now that his brother would not be _so_ terrible as a king. So Loki _must_ rule.  
But it did wear on him terribly sometimes.

Now at the end of the day he could slip away to Johnny’s rooms, and know that she would see the wariness on his face and only smile at him. She would tell him to lay down with his head in her lap, and stroke his hair when he did. Of course he did; it was _Johnny_. Obeying Johnny felt natural, peaceful; she defied him and he loved her for it, but she would never hurt him and never betray him, and so he trusted her.  
Trusting Johnny felt more right than anything Loki had ever known; being _able_ to trust her felt good, it felt safe. He hadn’t trusted someone so easily since he was a child.

He also remembered telling Thor that satisfaction was not in his nature. Loki had never been quite so glad to be wrong.

The day had been long and unpleasant, but Johnny’s hands were soothing as they combed through his hair. He kept it long because she liked it, because she liked playing with it and brushing it and _pulling…_ Loki hummed at the thought, stealing another grape from the plate in front of them. When Johnny paused her stroking, he whined, unashamedly butting his head against her hand, partly to encourage her to continue, and partly to hear her laugh, which she did.  
“Mocking me _again_ , Johnny?” he teased lazily, allowing himself the luxury of a full body stretch, which just so happened to push his face closer to the inside of her thigh. “How terribly unkind.”  
“You’re affectionate,” she commented lightly, ignoring his teasing for the moment. “Was today truly so awful?”  
“Why do you assume it was?”  
“Because you are affectionate.” Johnny sighed, one of her hands drifting from his hair to rest on his shoulder. She squeezed gently. “Loki…”  
“I beg of you, dearest, do not,” Loki said, despite that he hated to beg. Johnny was ever his exception. “I long to forget it.”  
“Must you be so dramatic, dear?” Johnny chided. Loki smiled at that. His dear Johnny had always been able to see right through him. There was a time when he had hated that in her, but now it only comforted him. She would never require him to be anyone other than himself. There was such… _peace_ in that. He nuzzled closer, resentful of the soft cloth of her dress barring him from even softer skin. “I worry for you.”  
“You need not,” he assured her, the half-lie thick and heavy on his tongue. “I have you.”  
Johnny stilled for a moment, but this time Loki did not move to urge her to continue, content for the moment with the weight of her hand in his hair. After a moment she sighed, scratching her nails lightly against his scalp in an extremely _distracting_ gesture. If a slight sound escaped him at how good that felt, he could trust her never to mention it.  
“Is that enough?” she asked quietly. Loki nudged his head against her hand again.  
“Hardly. Do continue.”  
“Be serious, Loki.”

Serious? It was a difficult thing to know how to explain, but he _did_ understand her need to know. Very well then.  
“Peace,” he began, well aware that his voice was muffled by her dress, and trusting her to hear him anyway. “You grant me peace such as I have never known.” Johnny’s hands carded through his hair again, pulling it away from his face, presumably to hear him better. Whatever her intent, he savoured this touch as he did all her touches. “For you alone I need play no role, nor rise to any expectations. It is more than enough.”  
“I expect nothing of you,” she agreed, “except that you will always be Loki.”  
“That at least I believe I can promise,” he said lightly, tilting his head to smile up at her, eyes still closed. “I trust you, dearest. It is a peaceful thing to finally trust.” Even saying the words, admitting it out loud, felt like a weight lifting from him. No need for lies, no need for secrets. As skilled as he was with both, the absence was refreshing. “You require so little from me.”  
“Only your love.”  
“Ah, but that I give freely and with no complaint. I long have.”

When Johnny went still and quiet, Loki cracked open an eye, looking up her pensive face. She smiled awkwardly down at him, and, seeing the thoughts rushing behind that smile, he reached up a hand to cradle her cheek.  
“What is it, my love?”  
“How long, then?” she asked, tilting her head. Loki breathed out a sigh, because truly, he didn’t know. He couldn’t say when furious, vicious obsession had turned softer, only that it had, and that he was grateful. This obsession was kinder to them both.  
“I couldn’t say,” he said after a moment, relaxing onto his back to look up at her, his head still pillowed on her lap. Johnny smiled fondly and brushed a single strand of hair from his face, curling it around her fingers. “Some time in the dungeons. Perhaps in some moment when you smiled at me and I felt you meant it.” He moved his hand down from her cheek to brush her soft lips. “Like this, now.”  
“My dear…” Johnny shook her head fondly, but something in her eyes was still sad. “That is not so very long.”  
“Is it not?” It felt like a long time. Nearly as long as he had known her. How could he have loved longer than that? “Then do share, my dearest, for how long you have-”  
“Since the day with the wine,” Johnny said suddenly, cutting him off, as if she had to force the words out while she could still say them. “Or perhaps a little later, but childhood, at least.”

Suddenly Loki found he could no longer stand the distance between their eyes, sitting up and cradling her face between his palms with quiet reverence because how, how could she have loved so long and he had never even known?  
“ _Why?”_ he asked her, watching with hopeless confusion as she smiled, her thumbs brushing over the lines of his face.  
“Because I saw things no one else cared to see. I saw that you were lonely, and that deep inside you were kind and noble, and that you were beautiful. Loki, when I met you in the dungeons I mourned the loss of the man you had been. I mourned you,” she smiled tightly, nudging their noses together, startling him. “And then I found you again.”  
“You knew what I was - what I am,” he reminded her; that alone still sat ill with him, that she knew he was a _monster_ , deep inside. Johnny just smiled.  
“I know _who_ you are,” she corrected. “Will you not smile, Loki?”

Though he felt the grin blooming in his chest, Loki kept a stern expression.  
“And why should I smile?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. Johnny laughed quietly, pressing a small kiss to his frown.  
“Because I wish it of you.”  
He grinned as he gathered her to his chest, pushing her back carefully against the seat and covering her with his own body, nipping at her lips. Well, he might obey her whenever she commanded him, but that did not mean he couldn’t have a little fun with how slight, small and pretty she was, now did it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These guys talk a lot. I promise next chapter they at least start talking about something different. :3  
> (I don't think I'm 100% happy with this chapter but a lot of this needed to be said before they could move on to other stuff so... here it is. Maybe I'm just critical of myself today.)
> 
> As always, comments are well loved, either here or over at http://smallcriminals.tumblr.com/


	22. Dilemma

She went to the healing rooms twice a week. At first they had hummed uncertain noises at the state of her, but surprisingly, they’d made progress. Not a lot, and she would certainly never walk again without her cane, but they reset some of the more obvious bone spurs, and even removed a splinter down by her ankle that made it painful to stand flat on her heels. She felt less… hideous. More comfortable in her own skin, now that she finally fit in it again.

When the ugly spur just above her knee finally flattened out into a barely noticeable bump, she was even happier than she thought she would be, looking down at her freckled legs and realising for the first time they actually looked almost normal. The scars had faded, only a few of the largest, darkest ones remaining, even those much less than they once were. Now, finally, all the worst of the lumps had been smoothed away. She still couldn’t stand by herself, but it would not be so obvious why.  
“Barbaric, what those men did.” Eir tutted under her breath, helping Johnny to stand from the low table she was resting on and handing the younger woman her cane. “They should be ashamed to call themselves guards. Well,” she added after a second, patting Johnny’s arm fondly. “They cannot do so now.”  
“What did… the king do about them?” Johnny asked quietly, not entirely sure she wanted to know. She could never ask Loki, but Eir was… Eir was almost a friend to her. The healer would be blunt, but kind. She wouldn’t explain more than Johnny could stand to hear.  
“Disgraced them,” Eir said in clipped tones, as if she agreed entirely with the king’s actions. “Quite publicly. Whatever jobs they find themselves in now, there are no helpless girls for them to hurt there.”  
“I am not helpless,” Johnny protested, but she smiled anyway, leaning heavily on her cane. “I believe it even feels easier to stand.”  
“Nonsense. Your legs were hopeless from the start,” Eir matched her wry smile. “But if your mind rests easier, other things will follow. It was kind of the king to allow you these visits.”

Sometimes, Eir got a strange twinkle in her eye when she spoke about the king, that made Johnny think the old healer _knew_.

“The king is very kind,” Johnny said in a slow, measured voice, one that could either mean ‘yes, that is what I am meant to say, although I hate him’, or ‘yes, Loki is kind to me’. The slight tilt of Eir’s head made it impossible to tell which one she heard.  
“You look nice today, dear,” she said in equally measured tones, gesturing to Johnny’s dress. It was a simple one, of course, since she was a prisoner still, but shorter than usual. Not the fashion, but… Loki’s wistful comments about how short her tunic had been in the dungeons had hardly been subtle, and finally Johnny felt comfortable enough with her legs to risk it. It was modest enough, barely above knee-length, not even as short as that ratty tunic she’d worn for so many years, but still short. She smiled, twisting her body slightly so the fabric swirled around her legs.  
“Yes, I thought I might attempt to.”  
“And done very well,” Eir agreed. “I always thought those long dresses looked stifling on you. And the colour suits.”

Johnny blushed, running her free hand against the pale green fabric.  
“I grew tired of all the blue I’ve been wearing,” she lied. Eir gave her a knowing look. It seemed as if she were about to say something, then someone in the other room called her name with urgency. “It’s alright. Go, I’m fine.”  
“I shall be back soon. Sit down again, don’t strain yourself, girl,” Eir warned, already inching towards the door. Johnny nodded and took a seat, waving the healer away. “Stay there, Johanna.”

Johnny pulled a face as the healer swept out of the room, but she did as she was told and stayed seated, playing with the smooth grip of her cane. She felt uneasy, exposed. She’d spent so long in one prison or another, to be left alone in an open place was frightening.  
A door slammed nearby, making her flinch. Suddenly the short skirt of her dress didn’t seem like a good idea, the colour even less so. Nobody wore green in Asgard anymore, not with the _implications_ \- but then, how many people knew she’d been in the dungeons with Loki, how many people knew that he’d smiled at her across the hallway? Too many, because the guards had all known, one way or another. _Two little lovebirds in different cages_ they had sneered, until Loki had frightened them into stopping.

And now she was wearing green in public. Johnny closed her eyes and hoped Eir would come back soon.

“Well, if it isn’t the little treasonous lovebird,” a familiar voice leered at her. Johnny flinched, her eyes opening to see one of the guards from the dungeon, one of the better ones. He’d never hurt her, only sneered and spat, and even then only when his friends had been around. For a second she felt relieved it was only him. Then she saw the look on his face and realised.  
His friends were the ones Loki had punished. He’d had no reason to hate her before, no real reason to be cruel, but he had one now.

He was angry with her.

“I didn’t-”  
“A half dozen good men are ruined because of _you_ , little lovebird,” he spat, stalking close to her. “But now your monster of a man is dead, and-”  
“Loki was never a monster!” Johnny snapped without thinking, her hand tightening on her cane. “At least he never tortured a helpless woman! If you want monsters, look to your friends.”

Perhaps the guard meant her no harm. Perhaps he only meant to scare her, suddenly drawing so close and looking so angry, but Johnny wasn’t trapped in a prison cell anymore.  
She hadn’t quite intended to strike him with her cane. It was already in her hand, and he startled her, and so she hit him. Hard.

By the time Loki stormed into her rooms that night, Johnny was actually feeling quite calm, or at least, calm enough to smile gently at him. Loki’s anger died out in a quiet puff of breath, his arms falling limply to his sides as he knelt before her where she sat on the edge of her bed, resting his head on her knee.  
“Johnny.”  
“It was only a small fight. Eir threw the guards out very quickly. I think several of them were more impressed than angry.” She tried to smile again, reaching to run her fingers through his hair, but he was already pulling away from her. “Loki-”  
“Johnny, I-” he bit out, and then shook his head. If she looked closely, she thought perhaps he was trembling. “I do not… trust myself, at the moment.”

She was about to protest, but there was a barely restrained wildness in his eyes that stopped her before she could speak. He seemed more like the man of a year ago, angrily pacing the dungeon cell, than he had in a long time.  
“At least sit,” she suggested, patting the bed beside her. Loki threw her a wary glance and then stiffly sat down, keeping an arms length of distance between them. “I hardly meant to start a fight, Loki. I apologise.”  
“It isn’t - I’m not angry with _you_ ,” he growled, his hands clenching into fists. “If they had hurt you-”  
“They did not hurt me, Loki, I’m-”  
“I would have _killed_ them!”

The silence burned a hole in her chest. Loki looked so lost. So incapable of controlling this. So afraid of himself.  
“Loki…”  
He must have seen some reflection of his expression in her face, because his brows folded helplessly into pitiful confusion, his hands twitching like he wanted to bury his face in them and sob like a child.

“I would watch all of Asgard burn, if it meant you were safe,” Loki admitted quietly, looking away. His hands fell brokenly into his lap as his shoulders slumped. “I hope you can forgive me that.”  
“That you know it needs forgiving is a good start,” Johnny said, but she knew it wasn’t much of a comfort. Loki did so hate to admit his failings. He’d spent so long denying them.  
When she reached out to touch him he shied away, though he smiled thinly at her to let her know it was not her doing. Not her he was afraid of. She picked up a fur from his side of the bed instead, wrapping herself in it and breathing in his frost-and-honey scent. Loki smiled, stealing one of her pillows to tuck under his chin in a similar comforting gesture.

“Do you now understand your father’s dilemma?” Johnny asked quietly, after minutes had passed in silence.  
“He was not my father,” Loki said, the words more instinct than meaning, and then, “what dilemma?”  
“That…” Johnny sighed, rubbing the soft fur of the blanket against her cheek. After a moment’s hesitation, Loki reached over and copied the touch with the tips of his fingers, caressing her skin.  
“What dilemma?” he repeated, softer and more curious now, her pillow held tight to his chest like a shield against what he feared she would say.  
“That to be a good king, you must love your kingdom above everything else. You cannot love even one person more.”  
“I love you,” Loki said quietly, his hand falling away from her to tuck nervously against his stolen pillow, “more than I love Asgard. More than all the nine realms and all the kingdoms therein, I love you.”  
“I know,” she said quietly, gathering the fur around her tightly. “It will be your downfall.”  
“How can it be, when you are the reason I love Asgard at all?”  
“Because you love Asgard not enough.” She sighed. “And me far too much.”  
“Never too much,” he protested, but she shook her head. “This is not-”  
“Look at yourself, Loki,” she urged softly. “This rage is poisonous.”

Loki’s shoulders slumped, his body curling up around her pillow like he was trying to hide.  
“I know,” he said quietly. “It has ruined me time and again, has it not? Yet I cannot… I know not how to control it.” A little hopeless laugh escaped him, and Johnny considered abandoning their distance to pull him closer and hold him. But Loki was still so frighteningly emotional, she didn’t know if he would let her. “I am a slave to my passions, aren’t I, Johnny?”  
“Very much so,” she agreed, sighing softly. “They define you. It’s not always so terrible.” She meant to sound light hearted, but she knew she hadn’t succeeded. Loki laughed anyway. “You have always been a passionate man, Loki.”  
“I used to believe that was a good thing.” Loki sighed and curled up on his side on the bed, his back to her. He did not even try to disguise the bitterness in his voice.  
“Loki…” Johnny abandoned the fur on the floor, laying herself over Loki’s side like a blanket, her fingers brushing tenderly through his hair. After a tense moment he sighed with relief and pushed up against her hand, his eyes screwed shut. “Loki, it is a wonderful thing. It gives you such brilliance.”  
“And such darkness.”  
“You cannot have one without the other.”  
“Then let me have neither!” Loki snapped, but as he was still nuzzling into her touch like an attention-starved kitten, she did not mind his brittle tone.  
“If you possessed neither darkness nor brilliance, dear,” she said in even tones, “you would not be Loki.”  
Loki sighed unhappily.  
“I am so tired, dearest.”  
“I know, my love,” Johnny said, gently extracting her mangled pillow from his arms. “Come to bed now.”

Loki grunted an agreement and quietly let her guide him under the blankets, latching onto her tightly and burying his face in the curve of her neck with a contented puff of breath. Johnny did _not_ point out to him that his dramatics were incredibly ironic, considering. Instead, she just wrapped her arms around him, still petting his hair.  
“If someone were to hurt you… you are all I have left, my Johnny.”  
“I know,” she said again, for lack of anything else to say. How could she reassure him that she would never be hurt, when she was really quite defenseless? She would not always have the benefit of surprise and a sturdy cane on her side.  
“I do so love you.” He sounded softer now, sleepy. Johnny stroked his back through the thin, soft fabric of his tunic, smiling when he hummed and curled closer. “This, at least, is a passion I can endure.”  
“Only endure?” Johnny could not help the tease. Loki sighed dramatically.  
“My greatest pain and deepest, most exquisite joy,” he corrected. “Tell me you love me?”

Perhaps on another day she would have taunted him playfully, denied it or asked why he so desired to know.  
“Of course I love you,” she whispered, pressing a small kiss to his temple. “In all your dark brilliance.”  
“Then I shall keep it,” Loki decided, very quietly. “If you love it so.”  
“I love _you_ , Loki,” she insisted. “And most everyone knows Loki is a passionate man. Do you really wish to be something you are not?”  
“Obviously not, no. But I am so very tired.”  
“Then go to sleep, dearest. You shall feel more yourself in the morning.” Even as she said it, she could only hope that it would be true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not much to say this week, though thank you to everyone who commented last week telling me not to be so down on myself. You're all very sweet, even if I didn't have the time or energy to reply.
> 
> Tumblr's still at http://smallcriminals.tumblr.com/ and any comments, here or there, are very much loved.


	23. Mornings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologise in advance for Loki being... well, Loki.

Loki woke up with a face full of soft, pale hair. Quite his favourite place in the world to wake up, in fact, but it did seem he’d overslept in Johnny’s bed again. He really had to stop doing that. One of these days they were going to get caught. Still, it had been a late night last night, and he’d had every reason to be tired...  
At first he wasn’t sure why he had woken, but then he heard a soft banging sound from the main room. The maid, then. He frowned. Surely they shouldn’t be quite so loud? That was just inconsiderate.

Still, incompetent staff aside, he was quite content where he was. He pressed his nose into the back of Johnny’s neck with a happy sigh, partly to indulge in the warm smell of her skin, but also to see if she, too, was awake. They might at least get a little sleepy cuddling in before he was forced to go out and pretend to be king.  
“Loki!” Johnny hissed. Her irritated tone did not bode well for the sleepy cuddling. “This is a problem!”  
“The maid?” Loki stretched, his back stinging slightly, reminding him of the lovely long scratches left from last night. “She’d hardly be so rude as to enter your bedchamber while you are still asleep.”  
“This one would,” Johnny whispered back. Loki frowned, slipping an arm around her to hold her protectively close. “She thinks that, as I am but a treasonous prisoner, there is no need to respect my privacy.”  
“Such rude behaviour…” Loki grumbled, kissing a stray freckle on Johnny’s shoulder. “Oh, very well. One moment, dear.”

Reluctantly untangling himself from his lover, Loki flopped over onto his back and lazily weaved his magic into the desired spell. It was little more than a parlour trick, a childishly simple invisibility charm, though he modified it as he worked to include a small illusion, just enough to make the blankets look flat and his pillow untouched. When he was satisfied the spell would pass muster he rolled back over to lay against Johnny’s back again, his arm going back around her.  
Johnny jumped, startled, and glared back over her shoulder at him, despite not being able to see him. Loki grinned to himself at that.  
“Loki!” she hissed. “Why don’t you just _leave_?”  
“I’ll not deprive myself of your company on account of a rude maid,” Loki huffed, stroking the palm of his hand against her side. “How scandalous she’ll think it, you sleeping here without even a nightgown to guard you from the cold…”  
“Loki…” Johnny was surely about to protest, but the maid’s footsteps drew close to the door, and she was forced to fall silent, laying her head back down against the pillow as if sleeping. “Do not dare,” she warned him under her breath. Loki grinned and nuzzled against her pretty neck.  
“Would I dare?”  
“ _Yes._ ”  
“True,” he admitted, nibbling the sensitive skin of her jaw. “Do try not to react.”  
“L-” The door clicked as it opened, and Johnny muffled her irritated growl of his name into her pillow, lifting her head slowly after a second as if she had only just awoken and looking coldly towards the door. “What?”

The maid was a diminutive redhead, pretty if not for the judgemental sneer on her lips. Looking at her, Loki realised with a sickening jolt that he once would have found her more attractive than his own sweet Johnny. He banished the unhappy thought by dragging his tongue against the underside of Johnny’s jaw; her skin was sleep-warm and soft, tasting faintly of the rose petals she’d used to scent her bath the night before.  
She attempted to elbow him without disturbing the blankets, to limited success.

“Just came to tidy up, _miss_ ,” the maid said nastily. “You left food out last night, _again._ ”  
Loki did feel a little bit guilty at that, as it was generally his fault when things went untidied in Johnny’s rooms, though not terribly guilty, because Johnny did usually insist on at least placing everything neatly on the tray. It was hardly a terrible mess for this maid to have to clean.  
“I finished eating late,” Johnny said, valiantly ignoring the way Loki was nipping at the outer shell of her ear. “I did not wish to bother a guard with it, since I am not permitted to return the food tray to the kitchens myself.”  
“Well, now you are bothering me with it,” the maid snapped, beginning to busily sweep and dust the room. “And to still be abed at this hour, honestly.”  
Loki traced his hand slowly up Johnny’s ribs, aiming for the weight of her breast against his palm. She yawned and stretched both arms above her head, managing to hit him in the face as she did so, and he stopped, letting his hand rest against her side instead.  
“Well played,” he whispered, leaning in to kiss the pale underside of her arm.  
“I was reading well into the night, since I have no reason to awake early this morning.” Johnny’s tone was still casual, but Loki could hear the anger creeping in. “It is no matter of yours what I do.”  
“No matter of mine what a prisoner does, lazing the day away while I work my hands to the bone cleaning up her messes.”

Johnny must have felt Loki tense up, for she slipped her arms beneath the blankets once more, blindly reaching for his hand and squeezing. He pressed a smile to her shoulder in thanks for the gesture, his fingers tight around hers.  
“It was decided that the brutal, crippling beatings I received in the dungeons were punishment enough,” Johnny said quietly. The maid looked up at her with an expression torn between disgust and horror. “Though certainly I will take your place, if you will take on my constant pain at standing. Truly, my leg pains me this morning so greatly that I do not know if it shall support my weight; and so I stay abed.”  
Loki knew his lover. He knew the shape and tone of her voice when she lied. And he knew that this lie was only so convincing because sometimes, it was true.  
He pushed his face hard against the back of her shoulder, splaying a hand against her hip possessively.  
“I…” The maid gasped quietly, holding one hand to her face. “I’m sorry, miss. I’ll… finish this later.”

With that she fled the room; as soon as the door to the outer room slammed closed, Loki found himself shoved out of the bed onto the floor with a soft thump, his spell vanishing with the sudden shock to leave him visible on the floor, blinking up at Johnny.  
She gave him a playfully furious look, folding her arms across her chest. Loki smiled sheepishly, though inside he could only thank her for setting aside the horrible thoughts of her pain and bringing their focus back to his little game.  
“‘Do try not to react’?” she demanded, mimicking his voice. “Loki, you utter cad.”  
“Now, really,” he said, offering her a small smirk. “Are you honestly surprised?”  
“Surprised? Not at all, but thoroughly embarrassed!” She grabbed at a pillow, hefting it threateningly. Loki held up both hands in surrender, laughing softly to himself.  
“Oh come now, Johnny. I could have done much worse, you know.”  
“ _How?_ ” Loki could see that Johnny regretted that question the moment she asked it. He grinned wolfishly, propping one hand against the floor so he could lean closer to her.  
“I could have slipped under the blankets and between your legs,” he purred, licking the corner of his lips at the thought. “I could have-”

The pillow hit him squarely in the face, making him laugh. After a moment, Johnny started giggling too, hiding her face behind her hands.  
“Now _that_ I do believe you would _not_ dare,” she said between giggles. “As much as I know you… enjoy such activities.”  
“Mm…” Loki hummed in agreement, moving closer to kneel by the bed, his head pillowed against one arm and the other hand dragging lightly against Johnny’s waist, just above where her skin disappeared below her blankets. “There is sure merit in such a suggestion, don’t you think?” His fingers dipped lower, slipping beneath the soft fur blanket that covered her lap. “Without the unknowing audience, of course. Just you and me, my dearest…”

Johnny tangled a gentle hand in Loki’s hair, and he leaned instinctively into the touch, for a single moment half-certain he’d actually managed to convince her. Then she pulled away again, shaking her head fondly.  
“The morning is already begun, and Asgard shall wonder what has become of their king.”  
“Am I not permitted to break my fast?” Loki joked. Johnny just rolled her eyes at him, shoving him away. “But I do so hunger for you…” he said, but he knew he’d already lost this one. Pity, it would have been so pleasant a start to his day.

But he could hardly mind it, he decided as he stood and stretched. His back still stung with scratches when he moved, and wasn’t that a wonderful thing?  
“Are you going to heal those?” Johnny asked, watching shamelessly from the bed as he turned his back on her to pick up his clothing from the chair it had landed on the night before. Magic might be a quicker way to disrobe, but Johnny did seem to enjoy undressing him, and he wasn’t about to deny her. And besides that, it meant he could dress the traditional way in the mornings, slowly, to draw out his time with her.  
Maybe when they had first begun this tender, intense relationship of theirs, Johnny would have apologised for leaving such marks on his skin. She didn’t now, though. She knew him better than that.  
“I think not,” Loki said with a smirk, fastening his trousers and picking up his tunic, glancing back at Johnny over his shoulder. “I like them.”

Johnny smiled, slipping out of bed and hobbling over to him, catching the arm he offered to help her balance with a grateful nod. She leaned easily against his back, sliding a warm hand down his skin and gently kissing the edge of one of the scratches. Loki closed his eyes and savoured her closeness, the warmth of her breath and the press of her skin against his back.  
“Will you feel them even when disguised?” Johnny asked softly. She very rarely even mentioned that he had to wear another face during the day, a _hated_ face.  
“I shall make sure of it,” he said, surprised by how hoarse his voice had suddenly become.  
“Will they remind you who you are?”

So perceptive, his Johnny.

She didn’t expect or require him to answer, reaching around his body to take his tunic from his hands and then gently pushing his shoulder until he faced her. Loki stood obediently still, one hand on her waist to help steady her as she drew the fine fabric over his head, directing him with soft touches to don one arm hole, and then the other. He smiled at her as she stepped closer to close the ties at his collar, her little fingers tying the loose knots deftly.  
It had the feel of ritual about it, this quiet, careful dressing, though they’d never done it before. When Johnny was finished she leaned up to kiss him, light and sweet, and that felt like ritual too; like deep, old, powerful magic.

“I love you,” he whispered softly. There was an odd intimacy about being dressed while she stood naked, but it was not a sexual thing. A sensual one, maybe. A secret, loving thing. Johnny smiled fondly, caressing his cheek. “I would that all my mornings were thus.”  
“So do I,” she agreed, sighing. “Go on now, lest we be discovered.”  
“It would be worth it,” Loki said, and he believed that. Whatever punishment Asgard might bring upon him for his deceptions, for all that he had done, it would be worth every second of the agony for just one more second here. With her.  
“For us, perhaps,” Johnny agreed with a faint smile. “But Asgard needs her king.”  
“Then let him go, and let me stay here.”  
“If only it could be so. Go,” she gently pushed him towards the door. He looked to it with a quiet sigh, and then rounded on her again, wrapping his arms around her, pulling her close and kissing her soundly. One last kiss to get him through the day.

Johnny, gods love her, pressed her hands hard against his back, making the scratches sting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, Loki's being kind of badly behaved, heh. He just can't help that instinct for mischief, I guess. It's all in good fun though.
> 
> As always, comments are well loved, either here or at the tumblr (http://smallcriminals.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Only four chapters until we read the end, so if anyone has requests for short intermission fics, get 'em in soon.


	24. The Past

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some descriptions of past violence in this - nothing hugely graphic, but it's there.

Loki must have scars. Johnny was not foolish enough to think that he didn’t, that he had somehow escaped unscathed from that time when everyone had thought him dead. She knew he hadn’t told her everything, but he’d told her enough that she realised he must have scars.  
And she had never seen them. It plagued her.

It was not the scars themselves, exactly. It was only that their absence sometimes seemed to… taunt her, almost, remind her that even after everything, no matter how many times Loki said he trusted her, he was still hiding behind illusions. Still keeping pieces of himself from her. She wanted to understand - she _did_ understand - but it still hurt.

Loki lay on his stomach on the bed with a satisfied air about him, the flawless skin of his back practically glowing in the candlelight. Sitting beside him, Johnny brushed her hair and tried not to make it too obvious that she was sneaking glances at the curve of his ass. Judging by the lazy smirk he gave her, she was being obvious enough. And the question prickled at her mind.

That, too, must have been obvious enough, for Loki's smirk folded into a small frown, one hand slipping out from under his cheek to reach for her.  
“Something troubles you,” he observed, his voice even. Johnny forced a thin smile, setting her brush aside and taking hold of his hand in both of her own. “Will you not let me soothe you?”  
“I’m not troubled,” she insisted, though she had little hope that he would believe her, even if in a sense it was true. It was not a strong enough feeling to call it troubled.  
Loki was not likely to see it that way.

“Watching me does not normally move you to frown,” he observed quietly, the hurt carefully concealed in his tone not quite escaping her. Johnny bit back a sigh, closing her eyes. “Have I caused you some offense?”  
“Loki, no,” Johnny squeezed his hand tightly, opening her eyes to give him a reassuring smile. “Of course you have not.”  
“Then why do you frown, sweet, pretty Johnny?”

Loki would be miserable until he got an answer, that much was sure. For such a brilliant man, he did have a terrible habit of letting things weigh on him far too heavily.  
“You have no scars,” she said quietly. Loki seemed to grasp her meaning, wincing faintly.  
“No, I do not.”  
“But you should.”  
“A great many, yes.” There was a forced calmness in Loki’s tone that Johnny didn’t like, and she tightened her grip on his hand. “Johnny, please. They are ugly things, I had thought not to inflict them upon you.”  
“You have seen mine.” Johnny shifted her legs underneath herself awkwardly, looking away. “You touch them as though they feel good beneath your hands. Yet I may not do the same for yours. It is… regretful, at times.”  
“Johnny.” Loki pulled on her hands to draw her eyes back to him. “Must I do this?”  
“No,” she assured him quickly. “But… I think I shall always be… troubled, by it. If only a little.”

Loki huffed a tired little sigh, sitting up slowly and dragging a blanket over his lap for some semblance of modesty’s sake, or perhaps just to make her smile.  
“Then I must,” he told her gently, as if he thought it obvious. Johnny did occasionally despise his martyr streak. But she would not argue with him. She could see he was determined, and… selfishly, she _did_ wish to see. “It is worst at my back, I believe,” he said, and she realised he was giving her a choice.  
“Then begin there,” she decided, offering him a thin smile of encouragement. “And the worst will quickly be over.”  
“Sound advice,” Loki agreed, though he did not sound as if he wished to follow it. Before she could tell him to do as he preferred he was already turning his back to her, his hand slipping from her grasp. Without the connection, Johnny was suddenly not quite so sure this was a good idea.  
“Loki-”  
“I’ll not beg you to be kind,” he interrupted, prompting her to smile quietly to herself. “That at least I know I need not ask.”  
“Of course, Loki.” Johnny shifted closer, putting a gentle hand on his shoulder, but Loki flinched away. “You don’t have to-”  
“I know.”

There was the tell-tale shimmer of an illusion being dispelled, and Johnny forced herself to stifle her instinctive gasp of shock. The patches of pale, perfect clean pink skin only made the scars look harsher, crossed over each other and edged with jagged, messy lines, not a single one of them a clean cut.  
“They liked the lash, for my back,” Loki said mildly, his voice so free of tone and inflection that Johnny could almost hear the pain in the absence. “A greater canvas for it, I suppose.”  
“Loki…”  
“It was an ugly thing, you know,” he continued, as if she had not spoken. “Barbed. I suppose you can tell from the damage it left.”

Johnny knew his callous words were defensive only, and steeled herself against them.  
“May I see the rest?”  
He turned to her with no comment, refusing to meet her eyes or even look at her. Johnny was not sure if she thought him wrong in his previous statements for, while his back was certainly far more covered in far more vicious scars, the wounds on his chest were their own kind of shocking. Broad, clean cuts of a knife, puckered at the edges where they were not allowed to heal, and little angry red marks she could only think to be puncture wounds littered his skin, as plentiful as her own freckles. But the worst…  
“This is a burn,” she observed quietly, focusing on one on his left shoulder, just a little further left than his heart. It was not the only one. Loki grimaced, but sat still and let her reach out to brush her fingers against the discoloured skin.  
“It would seem my...heritage,” he said, weakly, “makes me quite incapable of withstanding heat.”  
“Oh, Loki…”  
“The fire was the worst,” he continued, a hint of bitterness creeping in. “Or perhaps that was the knife.”  
His words drew her attention down to one of the slashes across his ribs, her fingers skimming down to touch the raised edge of the healed cut.  
“Though when it was _both_ , now that was an interesting… sensation.” He snatched at her hand, pulling it away from his side and glaring at her, an uncommon fierceness in his eyes. “Does that satisfy your curiosity, dear? To know how they _carved_ into me with white-hot blades?”  
“Loki-” Johnny pulled her hand free, more than a little alarmed.  
“Or shall I tell you more? Shall I speak of the whip, perhaps? The spear that lived in my side for I know not how long? Shall I describe how it _felt,_ Johnny, how-”  
“Loki, stop.”

She spoke softly, as if she had no hope of stopping him, but Loki instantly fell silent and somehow, Johnny had known he would.  
Moving slowly, afraid to startle him, she cradled his face in both hands and drew him close, pressing a tender kiss at the corner of his mouth.  
“My poor love,” she whispered. Loki choked on a breath, grasping at her wrists to hold her where she was. “Calm down. You needn’t fight me.”  
“I’m not.”  
“Of course you are…” Johnny sighed, stroking her thumbs against his cheeks. “Listen to yourself. You seek to spur me into anger, that I might forget your pains.”  
Loki said nothing, his eyes casting down in shame.  
“I am not angry, Loki,” Johnny reminded him gently. His eyes flicked back to hers in quiet relief. “May I touch…?”  
He nodded, letting go of her wrists, his hands lingering for a moment, ghosting down her arms before finally pulling away.

She touched gently, carefully, never staying too long over one scar. She did not think she would hurt him, but she could hardly be sure, and he seemed so uncertain himself, she did not wish to frighten him.  
“Do they pain you?”  
“Only as an ugly reminder,” Loki assured her, speaking quietly. He placed a hand over hers, tracing the edges where her fingers met his skin. “There’s no pain.”  
“My poor love,” Johnny said again, for there was nothing else she could say. “My poor Loki.”  
“The worst was that which left no scars,” Loki said, his hand lifting to touch her chin and bring her eyes to his. She nodded slightly. “The constant heat, it was… unbearable. I could hardly breathe. The hunger, thirst… and of course, the mind games.”  
“Oh, Loki…” Johnny smiled gently, running her hand through his hair, the scars forgotten for now. “What did those monsters do to my Loki?”  
“Ah, but I was not yours then,” he corrected her, attempting a smile. “Only an empty shell of a creature.”  
“Hush, you’ve always been mine.” At her words, Loki laughed quietly, wrapping an arm around her back to bring her closer. The scars on his arms did feel different against her bare skin, and yet it was still recognisably her lover, as if nothing had changed. “Everything you endured…”  
“But I did not.” Loki sighed, resting his forehead against her shoulder. Hiding. “I broke. I did what they asked of me.”  
“Loki…” Johnny smiled to herself, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. “If you had broken so easily, there would not be so many scars. To bear so many… you must have resisted for so long.”  
“I hardly remember,” Loki murmured, nuzzling kisses against her throat. “It seemed so brief. So endless.” When he looked up at her, his eyes were hopeful, open and vulnerable in a way she rarely saw. “Do you think…?”  
“I think you are stronger than you think you are, dear,” she said, kissing his forehead lightly.

“So kind to me.”  
With gentle and insistent hands he pushed her down against the bed, following her down to brace his hands on either side of her head, his knees straddling her hips. She didn’t feel trapped, reaching for him with both hands even as he leaned down to press hot, greedy kisses against her mouth.  
“I would like,” he said between kisses, breathing his words against her mouth rather than move an inch away, “I would marry you someday.” He paused, looking down at her, green eyes bright and warm. “May I?”

Johnny’s first instinct was to say no, to tell him all the reasons why that was a bad idea - that he was a king, or at least a prince, and she was a prisoner, or at most a servant, and everyone believed him dead and could never know differently. That any marriage between them would be dangerous and foolish. That they couldn’t, of course they couldn’t.  
Loki didn’t wait for any answer before he was kissing her again, softer this time, warm and sweet, nuzzling against her face affectionately. He was so beautifully endearing, and Johnny was so painfully in love with him, and she couldn’t remember a time she hadn’t been. It seemed as if everything they did was either dangerous or foolish. She curled her hands into his dark, soft curls, carefully avoiding the scars on his back as she drew him in closer for one more deep kiss, Loki humming happily against her lips.  
“Yes, Loki, of course,” she said when they came up for air. As the words left her it occurred to her that there had never been anything else she could say. “Someday, yes.”  
“Even if it must be secret.” Loki smiled, innocent and purely happy, kissing her once more before moving down to leave a line of little bites against her neck. “Only I do love you, my Johnny.”  
“I love you, too,” Johnny mumbled, understandably distracted. Without thinking she arched her back, trying to get closer to her lover, to feel the coveted press of skin of skin; at the feel of his scars she flinched away, opening her mouth to apologise, but Loki just grumbled against her skin and pressed his body down against her, settling his weight carefully and winding his hand into her hair, unconcerned about the closeness. Revelling in the closeness, despite the scars. Encouraged, or perhaps emboldened, Johnny let one hand shift down, resting gently on Loki’s back, her fingertips brushing against the edges of brutal scars; he paused, breathing softly against her neck for a moment, and then smiled faintly against her skin and went back to slowly and thoroughly devouring her.

“Thank you.”  
The words were whispered so quietly, muffled into her skin, that at first Johnny did not quite know them for what they were; when she realised, she could only smile, overwhelmed by how much this seemed to mean to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in posting, I'm fighting off a nasty cold and I went to bed far too early last night. This chapter... well, this is the last of our little honeymoon period, for sure. Next chapter is when the shit starts hitting the fan.
> 
> As always, comments are welcome, either here or at http://smallcriminals.tumblr.com/, and time is running out for short!fic requests to be posted in between now and the sequel. The more requests I get, the more you'll have to read during the downtime... probably.


	25. Trouble

It was not precisely that Loki had been waiting for something to go wrong. Waiting would involve thinking about it, but truthfully, he had not given it much consideration. Short sighted, perhaps, but it had been so long since he had been able to rest, he had… hoped for a little more respite.

It was apparently not to be. Thor had returned to Asgard, and while Loki’s lies had held for one brief, emotional conversation, he had little hope that they would continue to do so.  
That had rather been the point in ‘letting’ Thor leave for Midgard in the first place, although offering the big oaf a little happiness had been a definite advantage to the plan. Thor deserved some happiness.  
The same could perhaps not be said of Loki, but since Loki was not particularly happy, it seemed that everyone had gotten what they deserved.

Now all that Loki could hope to do was convince his brother that _Johnny_ was undeserving of any unhappiness. She was guilty of no crime greater than hating one monster and loving another. If Thor believed her innocent then he would protect her, and Loki could go easily into what punishment was laid upon him, knowing she was safe.  
This feeling, this… selflessness, it was not something he was used to. But Johnny inspired a great many strange things in him.

"You are quiet," his love observed. She was braiding his hair, twining thin locks around each other in a style that was not quite the current fashion of Asgardian males, but was reminiscent of it. He had not asked her to do this. When he had arrived in her rooms she had gestured for him to sit, a hairbrush in her hand. Of course he had gone willingly.  
He had a feeling she was striving to make him seem presentable, once the deceit was revealed and he would finally appear before others as himself once again. While he had difficulty bringing himself to care if he appeared neat, clean, and well-loved, he did appreciate that Johnny so insisted he be so. Especially if it meant he had her hands running slow and thoughtful through his hair.  
“What would you have me say?”  
“That you don’t have some foolish plan,” Johnny said mildly, her hands never once pausing in their task.  
“My plans are never foolish.” Loki desperately did not want to argue with her, not tonight, but his treacherous emotions, as always, had other plans, frustration beginning to sit heavy on his chest. Johnny’s fingers caught a small snarl in his hair and Loki flinched away. She just sighed, squeezing his shoulder, trying to soothe. Though it did not work as well as it should, he still settled back, letting her continue braiding his hair.  
“You intend to peacefully surrender yourself to any punishment Asgard’s nobles might see fit,” Johnny said. Her voice was tight and sharp with her own irritation, and Loki was at least comforted to think that he was not alone in his frustrations. “In exchange for my safety.”  
“Well yes, of course, and I fail to see…” A thought suddenly occurred to him, one that he had not considered for quite some time now, not since they had been prisoners together and he had despised her utterly. “How do you do that?” He looked back over his shoulder at her, ignoring her glare at the way his hair slipped from her hands.  
“Do what?” Johnny demanded, clearly of the opinion he was only attempting to change the subject. Apparently the hurt he felt at that showed on his face, for after a moment her expression softened. “What?” she asked again, kinder.  
“Know such things.” The braid Johnny had been working on began to unravel. Loki ducked his head back under her hands so she could attend to it, and she smiled to herself, shaking her head. “I can keep nothing from you. I have never been able to.” She raised an eyebrow at him, calmly tying off the braid and pulling her hands away. “It infuriated me, once. I… wished to destroy you for it. For seeing me for… what I am.”

Johnny gave a fond little laugh, catching her fingers under his chin so that he would look up at her once more.  
“Loki,” she said, all the fondness in the world in her tone. “That is how I do it.”  
“I don’t understand.”  
“I’ve watched you,” she explained quietly, “almost our entire lives. No one ever saw me, but I saw you, Loki. I _see_ you. The parts of you that you strove to hide from everyone else. I watched you learn how to shape your lies, and so of course they are transparent to me.”  
It was difficult to believe that it could possibly be that simple, and yet… of course it was. That Johnny, his Johnny, simply knew him so well that he had no mysteries left to keep from her. That which he had taken for cunning perception was only a deep understanding of his nature. It was… humbling, to know he was not so well disguised as he had always imagined himself to be.  
“When we were young,” Johnny continued awkwardly. Loki could see she was ill at ease with his silence, and so he let her fill the space with needless explanations. “When we were young, you worked so hard to hide your emotions from those you deemed important. But a servant girl like me… I was invisible to you.”  
Loki did so wish he could refute that, but he could not. Johnny had so many memories of him as a child and a young man, but Loki could recall only one of her as a girl. It was not a memory he was proud of, though Johnny spoke of it fondly enough. She had seen through him even then, to the boy who had meant no lasting harm, and only wished to divert attention from himself. And that, too, was humbling, because even then she had loved him. He thought sometimes that there was little in his life that he had ever deserved _less_ than he had deserved her love that day. He had been a coward, hiding behind her humiliation to escape his brother’s scorn.

He would not sacrifice her again.

“It is not a foolish plan,” he said quietly, resolute even when Johnny sighed. He hated to upset her like this, but he wouldn’t be swayed. If there was only one thing in this universe in which he would not obey her, then it would have to be this. “Thor is a good man… perhaps still even a good brother. If I entreat him to protect you, he shall.”  
“You would give up your pride and beg, then?” Her expression was sad, too sad, and he could look at her no longer, laying his head on her knee. “You know I would not ask that of you.”  
“I know,” he said, and truly, he did know. But it changed nothing. “What other options are there, then, if you deem this plan so unsuitable?”  
“I don’t-” Johnny cut herself off. The sharpness in her tone made him look at her, unable to keep himself from mumbled soft assurances at the sight of the tears in her eyes. When he reached up to brush them away she pushed his hand back, scrubbing indelicately at her eyes with one wrist. “I don’t know, Loki, but please… anything but this.”  
“It is wretched,” he agreed on a sigh, settling his head back in her lap. “Very few punishments they might inflict on me could hurt more keenly than your absence, of course. And I _do_ feel sorry for my brother, who shall have to take on this unwanted crown…” He sighed again, this time with relief as Johnny threaded her fingers into his hair, laying her hands flat against his skull like she did not know whether to soothe or punish him. “He shall not be so terrible a king, I think. Especially if he has the good sense to keep you as an advisor, you have proven yourself quite good at it, my dearest.”  
“Loki…”

He knew she wished him to stop his careless talk of his impending punishment, but how could he stop, when this idle talk was soon to become their reality? How else could he steel his heart against what was to come?  
He was not delusional to believe that he was in the right. Hurting Johnny was never right. None of this was right. He simply didn’t know what else to do, and so in frustration resorted to his old standby: anger. He would despise himself for it later, of course, and happily bury himself in the ugliness of shame. By then there would be no Johnny to keep him from doing so.  
Johnny sighed, slowly combing her hand through his hair, the gentle steady pull of her fingers crushing his anger as surely as if she’d squeezed it in her fists. And without the anger, Loki felt empty. He wasn’t sure he could call that an improvement.  
“I don’t wish to do this,” he said quietly, knowing even as the words left him that it was a half-lie, at least. The thought of this, all of this, finally coming to an end was not entirely unpleasant. There were things he would not miss, in amongst all that he would. “But I see no other way. Do you?”  
“I do not,” Johnny admitted, though it must have pained her to do so. “If you will not continue on as we have.”  
“I cannot lie to Thor.” Loki sighed, lifting his head from her knee and climbing heavily up onto the seat beside her, his arm around her waist and his head on her shoulder. Johnny smiled thinly, and neither encouraged him nor pushed him away. “Surely you should be proud of me,” Loki said, attempting some humour, though the brightness of it was dulled by his own emptiness and her sour mood. “For once I wish to tell the truth.”  
“You tell the truth much more often than people believe you do,” Johnny told him, resting her head against his shoulder with a tired sigh of defeat. “You’re a liar by design, Loki, not by nature. You’re perfectly capable of the truth, when it serves you.”  
“There is that.” Lifting his head, he pressed a kiss to her brow and curled a loose strand of pale hair around his fingers, wishing… wishing for so many things. “This may be the last night I ever see you, my love. Must we fight?”  
“We fight _because_ it may be the last night we ever see each other,” Johnny said, but a smile tugged her lips as she said it, her hand catching his and lacing their fingers together, steady and still. “You would have me smile and act like this is not at an end?”  
“If it pleases you.” He wanted to kiss her, of course, but dared not, not when a kiss was an invitation to more that she would likely refuse. He didn’t know how angry she was, and he didn’t care to find out.  
“And if it does not please me?”  
“Then tell me what will, and I will try to grant it.” Even as he said it, they both knew it was not possible. What would please her would be some solution to this that did not tear them apart, and Loki could not see any such solution.

Truthfully, Loki could not see any solution that did not end in his death. But that, at least, he would keep from her for as long as he was able, to spare her the grief. And to spare himself the grief of seeing hers.  
A liar by design, then? For all it seemed that Johnny knew him better than any person ever had, he could not help but feel that she was generous in her assumptions of his nature… and his motives. Lying to her felt wrong, of course, but he couldn’t see any other way. Even this far out of the dungeons, he was still trapped.  
“Tell me you will keep your promise.”

At first he did not recall which promise she might mean, and looked to her for explanation. But Johnny offered none, only watching him with that narrow-eyed determination that had never suited her. How little she had changed. The few rough edges of the prison falling away, that was all, her kindness and angry, frightened strength a constant. But the way he saw her had changed: that ill-suited glare of hers had once been laughable, and now it was dear.  
Johnny had not changed, but he had.  
“Which promise?”  
“You told me you should like to marry me, one day.”  
Ah. The very mention of it was both warming and deeply painful, the memory sweet, and the future unhappily certain.  
“As I recall,” he said, delaying any need for an answer, “it was you who promised such to me.”  
“Such things require a promise from both parties,” Johnny insisted, both her hands coming up to frame his face, ensuring he would not look away as she must have known he wanted to. Wanted to even more still, with her small, gentle hands holding him there so lightly, so easily broken free from and yet with more power over him than any shackles or chains. “You promised me, Loki. If you wish to know what will please me, it is only your vow that you will keep your promise. That is all I require.”

“Of course I shall.” Loki sealed his vow with a kiss, and knew himself to be a liar. By nature or design, it mattered not. Either way, he still lied.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's this, a chapter? I know, I can hardly believe it myself! And looks like consequences are finally starting to show up...
> 
> So before Christmas I said I'd be posting chapter 26 today and 27 next week but as you can see... that didn't happen. I got really, really ill the week before Christmas, and then ill _again_ the week after the new year! So unfair. I had a good holiday season, though, and hope everyone else did, too! We're on track for chapter 26 next week and 27 the week after that, and then this story is done... I know, I'll miss it too. Well, until the sequel, anyway...


	26. The Difficulties of Loving a Monster

Johnny knew there was a path between her rooms and the king’s chambers, some hidden passage known only to a few. That was how Loki came and went in the evenings and the mornings, slipping unseen to her side.  
Unfortunately, it had never occurred to her to ask him where the passage was, and so she was forced to sneak through the halls on what little stealth magic she had. She didn’t know what she was going to say or do when she reached the royal chambers, but she had to do _something_. Despite what he’d told her, she knew Loki was going to do something foolish.

The spell she was a simple trick: a bit of gentle misdirection, that would not conceal her from anyone who was looking, or who suspected she might be there. That meant that she must remain silent and attract no attention to herself, and so she had been forced to leave her cane behind in her own rooms. She had to lean against the wall to keep herself steady as she moved through quiet corridors towards the royal chambers. It made her feel uncomfortably vulnerable. The cane was the only way she had to move around easily… and her only weapon.  
With Loki’s status as king uncertain, she genuinely did not know what would happen if she was caught.

When she reached the king’s rooms, she found them empty and… remarkably cold. Just as she had tried to avoid thinking about Loki’s daily life of pretense and lies, Johnny had never stopped to wonder where he rested on those rare occasion he did not spend every stolen moment of time with her. Now she felt she understood, at least partly, why he had been so drawn to her side.  
There was nothing personal here. Nothing of Loki’s, and anything of the Allfather’s would have been stripped away to spare him some sanity. No one could expect Loki to live here amongst the belongings of the father he had murdered.  
Except that, in not considering that he might have to, Johnny rather had.  
She shook her head, reminding herself that she had welcomed him into her own rooms, until they were as much his as hers. She had _not_ left him alone to dwell on his misery, as his family had for so long. She had simply not realised the true extent of some of his hardships, and likely because he had kept them from her.

This, she told herself as sternly as she could, was not the time to doubt herself.

There was shouting in the hallway - she recognised the noisy boom of Prince Thor’s voice, though the words were indistinct. Without really thinking she hobbled over to the bedroom to hide herself, leaving the doors open just a crack. She didn’t want to believe she was in danger, but she didn’t know _what_ to believe anymore. It was better to be careful.

The door was flung open with a loud crash and Thor stormed inside, Loki at his heels. Neither brother looked best pleased with the other, though Johnny was pleased to see none of Loki’s long fractured madness in his furious glare; he was, though angry, apparently entirely sane.  
“Brother, you are being unreasonable!” Thor shouted, the door still hanging open so that all of Asgard could hear him. If they had walked all the way here from the throne room, the secret was likely known to all by now in any case. Johnny didn’t know if she found that frightening or not, but what was done was done. She couldn’t undo it.

“Oh, how poisonous am I, then, that even the truth is unreasonable now?” Loki spat. Something tired and angry and hopeless boiled up inside Johnny’s chest. She was already frustrated and upset and that someone would insult Loki - _her_ Loki - even from the man himself it was intolerable. Apparently there was only so much she could stand.

“You’re not poisonous, Loki.”  
She spoke quietly, but there was a silence following her voice that made it clear that she had been heard. Loki laughed softly to himself, shaking his head as he reached out a hand to her wordlessly. Johnny pushed the bedroom door open, taking the few shaky steps across the room to take his hand just as silently.  
“You shouldn’t be here,” Loki muttered, almost to himself, as he pressed a gentle kiss to the top of Johnny’s head, pulling her carefully close to him. She leant gratefully against his side, winding their fingers together.  
“You did not truly believe I would let you do this alone?” Johnny smiled thinly. “How little you must think of me.”  
“Never.” Loki squeezed her hand, and then frowned. “Your cane…?”  
“Interfered with my rather poor attempt at stealth,” she admitted, feeling foolish now for leaving it behind. “But I am fine, Loki.”

“This must be your Johnny, brother,” Thor rumbled. Johnny blushed, instinctively moving a little closer to Loki, almost wanting to hide. It had been so long since she had been noticed. Even longer still since someone had looked on her with something so resembling approval.  
Someone other than Loki, of course.  
“Yes, I suppose she must be,” Loki muttered, somewhere half between fondness and irritation. Johnny smiled, squeezing his hand gently, and he sighed and cleared his throat. “That is, yes, of course she is. You see now why I speak of the difficulty in protecting someone so _frustratingly_ wilful.”  
Thor gave Johnny a knowing look.  
“Yes, Loki,” he said slowly. “I can see why that would vex you.”  
Johnny forced herself not to smile. This was not the time to laugh at Loki’s expense. That small self-reminder sobered her quickly. This was not the time to laugh at all.  
“Loki…” she said quietly. “This is not about me.”  
“It’s at least partly about you,” Loki said, “since my brother has yet to promise he will protect you, my _only_ request of him.”  
“Of course I shall, Loki,” Thor said dismissively, as if that had never been in question. Perhaps it never had, Johnny did not know the prince well enough to tell. “But brother, why is this necessary? Why now, if you have been…”  
“If I have been what, _brother_?” Loki spat. “If I have been ruling here so nicely, why should I ever admit that I _killed the king_?”

As far as Johnny knew, that was the first time he had ever admitted it. All the anger seemed to leave him on a breath, and he sagged slightly against her as if he were losing the will to fight.  
“Is that what you’re asking?” he asked his brother quietly. Thor sighed.  
“No,” he admitted. “You have done a terrible wrong, I know this. But for all of your sins, Loki, you are my brother still. I love you still.” He sighed again, his big broad shoulders so heavy with a weight Johnny knew all too well. “It has been so long since I have seen you so… well.”  
“So sane, you mean,” Loki said, though there was no accusation in it. Thor inclined his head in agreement. “Yes, I suppose, but what has that to do with anything? By your own admission I have done wrong. Would you not see me punished for it, then?”

Johnny frowned. She could not understand what Loki thought he had to gain from baiting someone who was so obviously trying to help him. Pride, perhaps, but even that was doubtful. She looked over at Thor, expecting him to be equally confused, but he only wore an expression of resigned understanding.  
“Perhaps I should,” he admitted. “But I am tired of this, Loki. If father is gone, then you are all I have, and I have seen you hurt too many times to wish it on you now. No matter how much you deserve it. Will this cruelty and misery never end?” He took a step closer, and Johnny found herself shuffled backwards as Loki stepped away, still keeping her close. “Can this not be about the _good_ you have done? Just this once, why can’t this be about the _good_? Asgard prospers, brother, more now than it has in years.”  
“And I must entrust the rightful king to keep it so.” Loki shook his head. “For which I am sorry, Thor. I would never have wished this on you. If you’ve any wisdom at all you’ll rely on Johnny.” He pressed another kiss to Johnny’s forehead as he spoke, smiling thinly. “If anyone is to blame for Asgard’s prosperity, it is her, not me.”  
“You know that isn’t true,” Johnny protested. Loki ignored her, but his pained expression would suggest it was because he agreed. “Asgard would be poorer for the loss of you.” She shot an apologetic look at Thor, but he was already nodding his agreement.  
“We all would be,” he added, apparently encouraged by finding an ally in Johnny. “Brother… surely you must realise the nobles will insist on execution.”

Johnny felt her heart turn cold, her breath suddenly too thick for her throat. Loki must have felt it, some stiffening or tensing she didn’t even notice herself through the rushing in her ears, because he squeezed her close for one nearly painful second and then, thankfully, he let her go, knowing her well enough to know she would stumble back from him, wobbling unsteadily for more reasons than normal.  
“You knew of this?” she demanded; Loki did not even try to lie. He only nodded. “When were you going to tell me?”  
“I was not going to tell you.”  
Johnny could feel herself shaking, though from anger or from worthless legs she couldn’t say. Thor stepped up behind her, laying a steadying hand heavily on her shoulder, and Johnny was only made angrier by the way Loki flinched at the sight.  
“Coward,” she spat, though she only meant it to be a whisper. The moment it was in her throat anger twisted it, vicious and bitter, and she wondered if this was how Loki always felt, if this was what he struggled with so helplessly, this urge to tear and destroy rather than admit that to being broken by this. A look of hurt and desperate, almost frightened betrayal crossed Loki’s face, so strong it seemed he might crumble beneath the weight of it, and then his jaw tightened and his eyes set narrow and sharp.  
“What have I done,” he demanded in low, snarling tones, “to deserve such scorn and censure? How have I earned such insult now? By protecting you?”  
Johnny had not seen him so angry for so long, not since the dungeons, when she could tell herself it wasn’t really her he was angry at. The same defense should work now but it didn’t, and she wanted to crumble herself, and fall to the ground and cry and hope against all hope that he would comfort her.

Instead, she lifted her chin and forced her face into that glare he always found so comical.  
“By realising that death is easier than redemption.”  
Loki sneered, raising one hand as if to grab her. Then he realised, balling it into a fist and forcing it back to his side with a shaking arm, beginning to pace simply, she suspected, so he did not have to stand there and look at her.  
“You would know about that, wouldn’t you? About the easier path, hmm?” He shot her a glare full of disgust, though for whom, she was not sure even he knew. “All your talk of revenge, and yet you let yourself rot in that dungeon with no protest. You didn’t even fight it, did you?”  
“It was a revenge I knew I could never have. I could only tell myself that I had tried.” As she spoke, she felt Thor squeeze her shoulder in silent support. Johnny sighed, closed her eyes, and breathed out her anger. “Won’t you even try, Loki?”  
“Nothing you have done is beyond redemption, brother,” Thor said behind her. Johnny was not sure any of them believed him. “Not even this.”

Loki stopped his pacing, his head half bowed as he ran his hands through his hair in frustration. His fingers caught on the braids Johnny had woven there the night before.  
“You’re both fools,” he muttered with a bitter laugh. “You think that anything can be done for me now?” He laughed again, shaking his head. “You think that anything ever could? Talk some sense into each other, I wash my hands of you.”

He did not slam the door to his bedchamber behind him, only closed it with a sharp, resolute click and a green shower of magic that made it clear the door was locked. Johnny would probably have felt better if he’d slammed it. She sighed, letting herself slump back against the arm Thor put over her shoulders. They may not know each other, but she felt a kinship with the older prince. He, too, knew the hardships of loving Loki.  
“I apologise, my lady,” he rumbled, “for my brother’s behaviour.”  
“I am quite used to your brother’s behaviour,” Johnny replied with a small smile. Thor chuckled.  
“Yes, of course.” He seemed lost for words for a long moment, and then noticed how heavily she was leaning on him, ushering her over to a chair. “Here, you should sit.”  
“Thank you,” Johnny forced a smile as she sat down, as gracefully as she was able. “I am sorry, I never… This must be difficult for you. To return home to find the brother you thought dead is alive, and the father you thought alive…”  
“Yes,” Thor sighed, pulling over a chair for himself and sitting down heavily. Despite being such a large man, he seemed in that moment so very small. “I do not know how to feel. Perhaps I should be angry with him.” He sighed again, shaking his head. “I think I would be angry, if he had acted from ambition or his own rage, but he did not speak to me of the offenses he felt had been committed against him. Only of Asgard’s need. And of you.”  
“I did not ask him to-”  
“I know,” Thor assured her, smiling. He had a warm, kind smile, but a tired one. “But it is the first time he ever stopped thinking of his own hurts.” He shook his head, trying to clear it. “I am sorry for your mother.”  
Johnny nodded slowly.  
“Her death was… possibly unnecessary. Certainly it was ruthless. But I no longer think of it as the great evil it seemed to me when I was a child. Only a small crime, perhaps.”  
“May I ask…?” Thor gestured with one hand for her to continue, and Johnny smiled thinly.  
“We were winning the war, but it was taking too long. Those left at home were becoming restless, questioning. The king… he sacrificed lives that might have been spared, to end the war sooner, and calm the unrest of the citizens. It must have a difficult choice.”  
“It was wrong,” Thor said bluntly, startling her; when she gave him a questioning look, he nodded sharply. “My father was a ruthless king. Perhaps, in his later years, even a dangerous one. As I child I always believed… but now I see that any choice that sacrifices lives is wrong.”  
“I cannot be so certain, but thank you.”  
Thor leaned forward, resting his arms heavily on his knees.  
“Lady Johnny, do you know why Loki has so well convinced even those who knew my father best?” He smiled faintly. “Besides his skill in acting, of course.”  
Johnny smiled, shaking her head.  
“We wanted it to be true,” Thor said, the humour gone from his voice. “We wished to believe in an Allfather that could show mercy still, and admit he was wrong. I see now that my father has not been that way for some time. Loki… has been the king we wished the Allfather still was, and so we accepted it, because we wanted it to be true.”  
“He is a good king,” Johnny sighed. “He always intended to be, I think. Even when he was at his maddest, in his own mind he thought he could do what was right. He said… that if you would not rule, and Odin could not, then he must. And he would do so as best he could, for Asgard. His intentions… perhaps they were never pure, but they were good, I think.” Shaking her head, she suppressed a laugh. “If only he did not hate it so much.”

Thor looked thoughtful.  
“Does he hate it so?”  
“Yes.” She gave up on resisting the laugh, soft and fond in her chest. “He finds it such a burden upon him. To put the needs of others first, and work so tirelessly at it… it is a miserable thing, to be a king, a thankless, impossible task, and not one in his nature. I had wondered how he ever managed to bear the weight. Now I know he cannot.”  
It was only when Thor reached out and clumsily touched her cheek that she realised she was crying. She brushed the tears away herself and took hold of Thor’s hand, her own small palm dwarfed in his. She never had a brother, but she was beginning to think she might have liked one, at least some of the time.

“I always knew he would be a better king,” Thor said. She tilted her head at him in a gesture of confusion she realised with a start that she had borrowed from Loki. By the way Thor smiled, it seemed he noticed. “Than me. I suppose that is why I was a little afraid of him. Why I allowed… why I _encouraged_ people to see him as lesser. To keep him in his place. There are many things I am not proud of.”  
“We have all done things we are not proud of.”  
Thor smiled, squeezing her hand.  
“It is clear why he loves you so,” he said, as if imparting a great secret. Johnny felt herself blush, looking away. “I am only glad that this, too, is not a thankless task. And that he is not alone.”  
“I think,” Johnny said, laying her free hand over their linked ones. “You are quite the only one who can understand when I say it is no hardship for me.”  
“It would seem I am,” Thor admitted sadly.  
“The only ones left who love Loki.” Johnny sighed. “Who cannot even love himself. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps we _are_ fools.”

“Perhaps…” Thor said, but he did not appear to be listening. A great heavy frown of thought had come over his face, making him seem quite grave. “It seems to me that we are burdened with two problems. Asgard must have a king, and preferably one fit to the task, and Loki must have a punishment, the most obvious of which is-”  
“Not worth thinking about.”  
“Indeed not. I freely admit that I shall be no great king. Yet we must all agree that Loki cannot be allowed to do as he pleases, in light of his crimes.”  
“Indeed not,” Johnny echoed, smiling to herself as she began to understand what Thor was suggesting. “He may not be allowed to do what he wishes at all. That would be quite the opposite of a punishment.”

Thor grinned at her, and Johnny realised that he was not nearly so stupid as everyone thought he was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Didn't get any comments last week, don't you guys love me anymore? :(
> 
> In any case, I have a splitting headache so not much to say this week. Enjoy big brother Thor being amazing, I guess? Next week is our final chapter, so I'll see you then!


	27. Silence

The knock on the door filled him with dread. Loki didn’t have it left in him to argue with his loved ones any more tonight. And since tonight was very likely all he would have left, it seemed he didn’t have it left in him to argue with them ever again.  
A pity they weren’t going to see it that way. And here he had almost convinced himself that pretending to sleep would somehow make the day end.

"Loki? It’s only me."  
Johnny sounded very tired, but she did not sound angry. That, at least, was promising.  
"And where, then, has my fool of a brother gone to?" Loki demanded, unable to control the bitterness that filled his words. There was a small pause, during which he could only assume she sighed.  
He did hate bringing her to this, but not even defeated as he was would he let himself think that at least his death would spare her sighs. He knew she would rather take the hurt from his hands than from his absence.  
“Might I come in?”  
Loki opened his mouth to deny her out of spite, to insist that she go and scheme with _Thor_ , since that seemed to please her so. Then he recalled how she had looked, trembling on her no-doubt painful legs, so betrayed. By him. Yet she claimed he was _not_ poison.

He resisted the urge to curl up into a ball and weep. What good would pitying himself do him now?  
“Loki?” Johnny spoke a little louder now, but still so tentative. Still so unsure. Somehow, that hurt more than any angry accusation she could ever make. She thought she would be unwelcome here, and he couldn’t blame her for it after how he’d treated her. Disgusted with himself, he flicked a hand at the door to remove the locking and sealing enchantments he’d placed there.  
“Please do,” he called out to her softly. Johnny pushed the door open with obvious hesitancy, and Loki was forced to curse himself again, this time for leaving her to stand outside the door so long without her cane, for she did not look steady on her feet. He started to stand, intending to help her, but then stilled himself. She had already pushed him away once. He could not stand it if she did so again. “May I… do you need a steady hand?”  
Johnny just smiled, raising a beckoning hand to him. Loki was at her side in an instant, one arm wrapped around her far tighter than was needed just to steady her, pressing his face against her hair.  
“My love,” he murmured, if only because the words were burning a hole in his throat. Johnny hummed, rubbing a gentle hand down his back.  
“Your brother has a plan,” Johnny said. It was the last thing Loki wanted to speak of, but her tenacity, at least, made him smile. “But I do not think you will like it.”  
Loki laughed bitterly, gesturing for her to continue, though he did not raise his head. Her hair smelled of rose petals, like it always did. He had never known a more comforting thing.  
“Very well, then,” he said graciously. “Tell me of this plan.”  
“It is clear that you must pay some punishment for you crimes, of course,” Johnny said. Loki felt her rest her head against his chest and realised they were both using each other to hide. “But we… Thor and I, we believe that… having you remain king is punishment enough.” She took a breath, as if meaning to pause and let him speak, but the beat of silence seemed to frighten her, and she continued. “It is something you hate so very much, after all, and it would be a fitting way to repay Asgard for what you have done. It would be your fault, after all, if this realm found itself without a worthy king.”

After a moment to be sure Johnny was really done speaking this time, Loki let out a ragged laugh, kissing the top of her head.  
“You’re right,” he admitted, still laughing a little. “I hate it.”  
Johnny just nodded, and said nothing.  
“Oh, it’s a good plan. Asgard is torn, between their need to see me suffer, and the good I have done as their king.” He laughed again, quite unable to help himself. That _Thor_ , of all people, would think of so neat a solution… “This way they have everything they desire. It’s perfect. But I do hate it.”  
“Is that not the point of a punishment?” Johnny asked, placing one hand feather-light on his chest. “At least you shall be alive to hate it.”  
“Will this make you happy?” Loki asked, sudden and sharper than he’d meant to. With a small sigh and one last kiss to the top of her head, he pulled back a little, catching her chin so he could look into her eyes. “Will it make you happy?” he asked again, softer. Johnny smiled.  
“ _You_ will make me happy.”  
“Then it is a good plan,” he decided. “For all that I hate it.”

He wanted to kiss her, but he could not know for sure that she would let him. Like the night before, he knew he could not take her rejection.  
She seemed to sense his conflict, lifting a hand to his face curiously. Loki could no more prevent himself from leaning into her touch than he could prevent his heart from beating.  
“You are not normally so hesitant,” she observed quietly.  
“Normally I need not fear rejection.”  
“Ah.” Johnny gave him a small smile, her fingers brushing lightly against his cheek. “Perhaps I can set your fears to rest, at least. If only so you will not look at me so helplessly.”  
She trembled as she leaned up to press the softest kiss against his lips, so Loki pulled his arm around her tighter, even if there had never been any danger she would fall. But despite her intentions his fears remained in the way she pulled away before he could coax her closer and assure himself everything was going to be alright.  
When he followed her down she shook her head, placing her fingers over his lips to still him.  
“Loki…”  
“I know.” He stood straight again, smiling his most apologetic smile. Even if she would see through him, he decided he might make an attempt at controlling his expressions. “It was instinct only, I… I know.” He smiled again, thin lipped and sincere, and then dragged in a calming breath. “But I am the worst sort of cad, making you stand for so long,” he said brightly. Johnny smiled sadly at his false cheer, but since he had no other cheer to give her, he continued. “Here, you must sit.”  
“Thank you.” Johnny did not even bother to hide her gratitude, nor the way she stumbled slightly as he helped her over to sit on the bed. Her legs sprawled out messily across the blankets instead of her usual protective curl. “I have walked far too much today with far too little support.”  
“I am honoured you thought me worth the effort,” Loki said with a small bow, standing awkwardly by the side of the bed. He was no longer sure of where the boundaries were, and of what liberties he was allowed to take.  
“Of course you are, my dearest,” Johnny said. She sounded so sad, but Loki did not know what to do to make her happy again, for all her insistence that he could. She laid a hand on the bed beside her in invitation and he went willingly, sitting next to her just close enough that their shoulders touched, and no closer. “Loki… I cannot simply choose not to be angry.”  
He resisted the urge to ask her why not, but she must have seen it on his face, laughing softly and leaning into his shoulder just a little.  
“Oh, Loki,” she sighed fondly, shaking her head. “I will not be angry forever. I may not even be angry by the time tomorrow comes.”  
“But tonight you are angry.”  
“So it would seem.”  
“... I don’t like it,” Loki grumbled. Johnny laughed again. Even if it was at his expense, it helped lighten Loki’s dark mood, to know that Johnny would still laugh. “Tell me you love me still?”  
“Loki…”  
“Tell me, please?” he pleaded, quite shamelessly. His hand stopped just before it touched her face, his fingers grazing the air above her cheek with a longing that was no less true for all that it was perfectly calculated it to perfectly convey his troubled affection. The look that Johnny gave him said that she saw through his flawless manipulations; the sigh that came after proved that she was not immune to them.  
“Of course I do,” she said, catching his hand and squeezing it tight in her own. Loki shook his head.  
“Say it.”  
“I do love you, my Loki.”

Loki made a small noise of satisfaction, laying back on the bed lazily. Johnny leaned over him, laying a gentle hand on his side.  
“Tomorrow is going to be awful,” he said, closing his eyes. Johnny’s hand twitched, and he could imagine her smile.  
“Endure it for me?”  
“Yes, of course,” Loki said, not even considering any other answer. He reached out blindly, finding her knee and squeezing gently. “Of course I shall.”  
He felt Johnny shift on the bed, and then a thin, soft blanket was drawn up over him, and tucked neatly around his shoulders, the backs of her hands brushing his face. Loki sighed, curling up on his side, eyes still closed.  
“Goodnight, Loki,” Johnny whispered, leaning down to kiss his forehead. Loki frowned, reaching out one hand to grab her wrist.  
“Stay,” he said, feeling her tense under his grasp. “Don’t go.”  
“I do not know if that is wise.”  
“It is surely not wise, but please. You belong here, my love. You have belonged here since the moment I set foot in these damned rooms.” He traced his fingers carefully against the soft skin of her wrist. “You have ever been my queen. Stay with me, so that I might have some hope of sleeping tonight?”  
“I… have nothing to wear,” Johnny said slowly. The words felt like a test, but a test of what Loki could not fathom. He grunted, waving a hand in the vague direction of the chair on which he had tossed the day’s clothes.  
“Borrow something of mine. It shall be like a nightdress on you, hmm? You’re so small.”

Whatever test had been in her words, he must have passed it, for she hummed in agreement and ran a hand through his hair as she shuffled to the edge of the bed, her weight shifting the bed beneath him as she reached out to take his shirt from the chair. Loki cracked one eye open to watch as she unlaced her dress and shimmied out of the soft green fabric, the pale skin of her back covered in freckles like flecks of dark ink across paper.  
“How lovely you are,” he muttered. Johnny looked back over her shoulder at him, rolling her eyes, and pulled the loose tunic on over her head. It dwarfed her, the shoulders slipping down her arms and the hem falling as far as her thighs. Loki grinned, propping one hand under his chin so he could watch her properly as she fussed with the ties, trying to at least cover her chest. “ _Very_ lovely.”  
“And here I was going to argue that you were _not_ the worst kind of cad,” Johnny huffed, though she was smiling. Loki just gave an awkward shrug, and reached out a hand to her. She lay down in his arms, curling her body back against his chest, and he hummed in contentment and nuzzled into the back of her neck. “There now. Are you happy?”  
“Yes, for the moment.” He paused. “Should I apologise?”  
“Are you sorry?”  
“I am not.”  
“Then I should rather you didn’t.”  
He grumbled sleepily, curling himself more fully around her, his legs tucking up as if to surround her, to keep her safe. Or to keep her with him. Perhaps both, he had not yet decided.  
“Johnny.” It was only when he heard how slurred and soft his voice was that he realised how close he was coming to sleep. It seemed the stress of arguing all day had quite worn him down. But this was important. “Johnny, my dear. No matter what happens, I will never be your king. Not yours.”  
She may have been facing away from him, but Loki knew his Johnny well enough to know, by the tilt of her head and the shift of her shoulders, that she was instinctively hiding a smile.  
“Goodnight, Loki.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late posting, I've been away from my laptop, oops.
> 
> So that's the last chapter! If you haven't left a comment yet, now would be a great time to let me know what you think :P I'm working on the sequel now (slowly), but I'll have a few extra scenes and things to put up over the next few months.
> 
> This is the first long fanfic that I've gotten finished and posted online for a long time, so those of you who've been reading and leaving nice comments all the way through, thank you for helping me get back into fanfic writing. See you all again soon, hopefully.

**Author's Note:**

> Beted by my perfect sibling. Got the whole fic finished, just need to edit it as I go along.


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